Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project

It is said that Miss Murfree concealed her sex under the name of Charles Egbert Craddock in order that her chances of success in literature might not be injured by the fact of sex. She evidently felt the disadvantage of being a woman. Miss Evans probably felt this disadvantage when she decided to appear as George Eliot, and struck as manly an attitude as possible. It may seem that these writers have overestimated an existing prejudice against female authorship, as if women must always do things with less strength or completeness than men, but there is just enough truth in this prejudice to make modest women careful how they crowd themselves into fields which have hitherto been almost exclusively occupied by men. They do not dare to say that they are men's equals in the competition for leadership in literature, and it may be that, in some departments of effort, they must retire from competition with the masculine intellect. Women seem to be incapable of the highest creative work, whether in art or letters. They have the maturing but not the constructive genius. But in the field of fiction, where the creative intelligence works upon materials already furnished to one's hand, women, though working upon lines which are differentiated from those travelled by men, may be said to be men's equals and to more than hold their own. It would seem as if the time had come when Miss Murfree could have won the success which she has justly deserved without assuming a character which did not belong to her. Though George Eliot and George Sand are distinguished company for her to be in, there is no reason in these days why a competent writer should not gain a hearing as quickly through one sex as through the other. The writers referred to had exceptionally masculine qualities, which easily lent consistency to the description, but despite the limitations of women, the sex is no longer at a real disadvantage in the world of letters, particularly in the world of fiction. The novel is woman's realm, and where, as in the "No Name" and the "Round Robin" series, the contributors are unknown and the sex of the work is to be guessed at, it is not easy to trace the woman's hand as distinguished from that of men. The fairly competent woman does as good work as a man does. Its quality may be varied, but it is only a variation of work, not work of a deteriorated character. Illustrations may be found in poetry, in fiction, and in all the departments of intellectual work where men and women are at an equal advantage. Two names, the Brownings, are striking examples of what a man and a woman may do in the same kind of effort. Both writers of poetry, each excelling in the same kinds of verse, the lyrical and dramatic, it is hard to draw the line between the two and say where the intellect of the one outshines the intellect of the other. "Strafford" and "Aurora Leigh" differ in some respects from each other, but both require the same intellectual gifts, and both are works of genius. Again, it is difficult to say that Walter Scott is a greater writer of fiction than George Eliot, or that "Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth" are better examples of medieval life, rehabilitated, than "Romola"; and, again, it would be difficult to say that Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" is a greater work then George Sand's "Consuelo." In the authorship of the really great novels of the century, women have done work that suffers nothing by comparison with that of men. In creative power, in the delineation of character, in the construction of a story, in the touches that awaken the moral sentiments and gain the mastery over one's nature, the woman is as likely as the man to do the best work. But you would never think of a woman as the author of "The Excursion," or as the writer of a treatise on logic, or as anything more than a sympathetic respondent to philosophical ideas at the Concord school of philosophy. The law of sex asserts itself even in literature, and when women attempt what is beyond them, as if the line of sex could be crossed over with impunity, nature appears with a sword that moves both ways, and forbids women to enter the garden where they may again eat of the fruit of the tree of all intellectual effort. Women's work in literature is usually complementary to that of men, and women are largely at a disadvantage in the matter of a suitable training for what they attempt to do; but where they work upon lines common to both sexes, the woman is usually the finer, the nicer, the more competent of the two in the quality of the writing. It may not be that the best prose is written by women. You can find nothing in women's prose to match passages in the writings of Cardinal Newman or Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walter H. Pater, but, on the other hand, you can find nothing in genuine humor that excels the New England stories of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, no revelations of child life that surpass those delineated by Louisa Alcott, no sketches of New England atmospheres that surpass those made by Miss Jewett, no home-spun dialect stories that are truer to life than those written by Rose Terry Cooke, no American religious poetry that more touches the springs of life than that written by Harriet McEwen Kimball. When you count up the achievements in poetry and fiction that have been reached by American women, there is no reason why any one of the sex should blush for fear she cannot do as good work as men do. Women seldom excel in the paths in which Miss Frances Power Cobb has made herself famous, the paths of ethical study, but where they are strong, their strength is something like the everlasting hills. They are not to be moved from their convictions, and the more women are brought forward and prepared for the fields of effort in which they are filled to excel, the more it will be gladly conceded that their merits rest upon foundations as substantial in their way as those which are joyfully conceded to belong to such writers as Hawthorne and Emerson. Miss Murfree's excellence has been recognized at once, because her touch was true, because she struck the right notes, and the wine was so good that it needed not the bush in which it was concealed.

Maurice Thompson, "Literature. More about The Short Story." America 3 (9 January 1890), 471.

    AMERICAN publishers say that books of short stories do not sell -- that the demand for them is not considerable as an element of the trade. Doubtless this condition is due to the kind of short stories to which American writers have turned their thought. Certainly there has been a large demand for a few books of the kind, notably the stories of Poe, Bret Harte and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
    Is the lagging sale of most collections of short stories referable to a lack of appreciation of brevity and concentrated force on the part of American readers? I think not. Bret Harte's shortest stories were most popular, and are likely to remain so. Uncle Remus has lost nothing by breaking his delightful garrulity into brilliant fragments. In short, Americans are sticklers for condensation.
    What, then, is the trouble? In another study in this column not long ago I considered one phase of this question, and tried to show that while our people delight in the shortest of short stories, our writers persist in setting at defiance the popular demand and pad out their work to about twice or three times the true artistic dimensions. Of course I did not mean by this to underrate our short-story writers. No country can surpass us in presenting a group of authors whose ability to produce striking stories is of a high order. Let me mention a few of our many artists in this line.
    Leaving out the names of the great dead, there are Aldrich, Harte, Mathews, Hale, Cable, Page, Harris, Janvier, Stockton, Edwards, Johnson and a goodly number of others, besides the flock of brilliant women led by Miss Woolson, Mrs. Phelps-Ward, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Spofford in the North and by Miss Grace King and others in the South. To mention all would be going beyond my space, and I have, therefore, penned the names that come first to mind.
    Now why should not a volume of short stories by any one of the above named writers have as great a sale as a novel from the same hand? From any one of a few of them it certainly would, because the power to write a novel does not belong to any of that few; but supposing the gifts to be equal -- that the author can work as well in one task as in the other, as many of them have shown that they can -- why does the public prefer their novels?
    If I had to answer this query and were sure that I could do it and at the same time avoid offense, I should say that "padding" is the word. What is lovingly termed "local color" has grown so dear to our American school of art that it has risen like a mountain stream after a rain storm. We use too many words to set our color; it is as if our fixitive were an essential element of our expression. There may be a commercial reason, too, for most of our journals and magazines pay by the yard -- that is by the column or page -- for the stories they buy, and who more than the poor author is tempted to lengthen his warp and scatter his filling under such a condition? Let us suppose a case. We will assume that a certain magazine pays $25 the thousand words for the short stories it buys, and that one author conscientiously works his invention down to the densest and most crystal-like proportions of art, while the other carefully mixes in a large amount of picturesque padding. It requires no difficult calculation to find out which of the writers will prosper financially. Five thousand words at $25 the thousand fetch two and one half times as many dollars as do two thousand words at the same rate. As a rule authors are poor financiers, but sooner or later [latter] they must discover the working of a rule like the one described.
    Still we cannot conclude that we have discovered a full solution of our problem, for the French write the best and shortest of short stories, and they are paid by the rule of space. At least it was Alexander Dumas, I believe, who first set the example of breaking up his matter into very short paragraphs in order to increase his income.
    In the first place, the short story must be perfected before the public taste regarding it can be properly educated. The art of this sort of creation is much more difficult than that of the novel; indeed, it is second only to that of the poem. A single thought, so to speak, is all that can be elaborated in it. Aside from this central invention there is nothing to give vitality to the short story, which, like a powerful sketch in colors, must glow with intense life without being overloaded with after-touches.
    It must be remembered (though it is forgotten by too many) that a wide space separates the mere study from the adequate sketch. American short-story writers make too many protracted studies, too few sincere and outright sketches. What may be called the New England dialect story is almost sure to be drawn out to admirable but flimsy tenuousness. The Southern stories are better in this regard, but carry too much color, as a rule.
    To be sure, if we regard the New England stories as mere studies our criticism does not apply, and it must be very much modified if we take the Southern stories as descriptive sketches. It is when observed from the point of view of creative fiction that both must fall short of the best success, so long as force is sacrified to an exhibition of verbal luxuriance, and so long as unity of construction is lost in a display of diluted humor.
    I do not hesitate to assert that we have in America a group of writeres (and I have named a few of the best) who have the very cleverest genius for short-story writing, a genius scarcely excelled by the best in France; but they do not use it to best advantage. Take the finest things done by Aldrich, Mathews and Cable, for instances, and what in the short-story line can exhibit greater originality of invention or clearer vision of color and form? But at the point of compactness of construction and unity of purpose how rarely they miss the fault of telling too much that serves as mere filling? It is the American habit, hard to leave off, easy to acquire. If I may say it without appearing offensively captious, our writers seem to doubt the acumen of their readers, and go to great lengths of analysis and explanatory description where a French story writer would project his thought by a phrase or two and leave it as clear cut as a crystal of quartz.
    I am mindful of the misconstruction that a hasty reader may give to my views; but the truth will soften as it is worn, and it fits best those who don it with illest ease. The bright and engaging American writers who are doing such remarkable work in short stories for our magazines will (some of them) soon learn that compression results in that intensity after which they have sought in vain by the color-stacking process, on one hand, and by the tedious method of analysis, on the other hand. The New England essay-story and the Southern word-wonder story may be best instanced in the works of Miss Jewett and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn. Both of these writers are notably attractive and spendidly effective, the exemplars of their schools, the extremes of the American habit; but they are not story-writers at all in the sense that Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet are story-writers. They lack the directness and absoluteness of stroke, the swift vision-focus and the lucky dash of expression that trusts just enough to the reader's imagination and cleverness of insight to make him feel a sort of copartnership with the author. Aldrich and Brander Mathews come nearest of any Americans, perhaps, to the French method of short-story making, but I must not fall into comparisons. Our story-writers deserve high praise, and must have it freely; the critics office is to suggest to them, in the friendliest mood, the loose joints of their armor.

From Thomas Bailey Aldrich, An Old Town by the Sea.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893, 1917. pp. 121-123

When I look back to Portsmouth as I knew it, it occurs to me that it must have been in some respects unique among New England towns. There were, for instance, no really poor persons in the place; every one had some sufficient calling or an income to render it unnecessary; vagrants and paupers were instantly snapped up and provided for at "the Farm." There was, however, in a gambrel-roofed house here and there, a decayed old gentlewoman, occupying a scrupulously neat room with just a suspicion of maccaboy snuff in the air, who had her meals sent in to her by the neighborhood -- as a matter of course, and involving no sense of dependency on her side. It is wonderful what an extension of vitality is given to an old gentlewoman in this condition!

I would like to write about several of those ancient Dames, as they were affectionately called, and to materialize others of the shadows that stir in my recollection; but this would be to go outside the lines of my purpose, which is simply to indicate one of the various sorts of changes that have come over the vie intime of formerly secluded places like Portsmouth -- the obliteration of odd personalities, or, if not the obliteration, the general disregard of them. Everywhere in New England the impress of the past is fading out. The few old-fashioned men and women – quaint, shrewd, and racy of the soil -- who linger in little, silvery-gray old homesteads strung along the New England roads and by-ways will shortly cease to exist as a class, save in the record of some such charming chronicler as Sarah Jewett, or Mary Wilkins, on whose sympathetic page they have already taken to themselves a remote air, an atmosphere of long-kept lavender and pennyroyal.

Peculiarity in any kind requires encouragement in order to reach flower. The increased facilities of communication between points once isolated, the interchange of customs and modes of thought, make this encouragement more and more difficult each decade. The naturally inclined eccentric finds his sharp outlines rubbed off by unavoidable attrition with a larger world than owns him. Insensibly he lends himself to the shaping hand of new ideas. He gets his reversible cuffs and paper collars from Cambridge, Massachusetts, the scarab?us in his scarf-pin from Mexico, and his ulster from everywhere. He has passed out of the chrysalis state of Odd Stick; he has ceased to be parochial; he is no longer distinct; he is simply the Average Man.

A MOST INTERESTING French woman has just passed through New York on her way to Chicago. To her friends she is Mme. Blanc; but to the reading public of France she is known as Th. Bentzon. Over the latter name she is a regular contributor to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and she may be said to have done more than any other person to present the American woman, in her true light, to the French public. Mme. Blanc is not only a prolific writer of original stories and essays, but she is an exceedingly clever translator of English into French. Among those whom she has introduced to French audiences in the columns of the Revue is Miss Sarah Orne Jewett. She prefers to translate stories that are racy of the soil, rather than those which show merely the clever writer, and have nothing about them that is local or national.

To a representative of The Critic Mme. Blanc said that her object in coming to America was to see the Americans at home, and to learn at first-hand what progress American women have made in the arts and professions. She has already gone to Chicago, to see that wonderful city and also the wonder city just below it on the lake-front. She will visit Boston as the guest of Mrs. James T. Fields, and then return to New York. While in the West she will visit some typical American towns – one, in particular, where there is a co-educational college, a novelty that cannot fail to interest a Frenchwoman. Indeed, Mme. Blanc is interested in everything that she has seen in this country, in which she arrived on Saturday last. Under the guidance of one of her old friends, Mr. August Jaccaci, art director of McClure's Magazine, she saw some of the sights of this city on Sunday – High Bridge, the Riverside Drive, the East Side, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter she considers magnificent beyond description, and as for the harbor of New York, she was not prepared for its beauty. Mme. Blanc speaks English with fluency, and one is astonished in talking with her to see how well-read she is in English and American Literature.

Every true American has a strong feeling of pride when he thinks of the part New England has played in his country's history. We welcome as a friend any writer who penetrates into the New England by-ways, among its sterile farms, where life is always a struggle, or along the shores, where men learn to be hardy and stern by living in combat with the sea.

Miss Jewett was born in 1849, in South Berwick, Me., a pretty manufacturing village near the sea-coast, and in one of the most interesting neighborhoods in New England.

Her father was a distinguished physician and ornithologist; he died some years since. In her childhood, being rather delicate, she was encouraged to lead an out-door life, and seems to have divided her time between nature and books.

"Her vision certainly penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotent bullet."

She accompanied her father upon his professional duties, and from him learned the family history of many people. Having an active and sympathetic nature we can readily perceive that these narratives formed the impetus for those inimitable character sketches of hers, such as are contained in "Tales of New England," "Country By-ways," "Old Friends and New" and "The King of Folly Island; and other people."

Miss Jewett began writing at nineteen, and besides the volumes of her collected stories, she has been a frequent contributor to leading periodicals, and has become acquainted with a multitude of readers through the columns of the "Atlantic Monthly." Such short stories have their own mission in this world. There can never be too much of this sort of literature bringing comfort to poor tired human souls.

One of the earliest of Miss Jewett's book was "Deephaven," and it won high praise for its wonderful simplicity, being simply the record of an uneventful summer spent by two young girls in a quaint, and almost deserted, New England fishing village.

It is called a novel, but it is altogether devoid of love and passion, yet wonderfully popular with the reading public. In this story, and also in "A Marsh Island" we see clearly the effect of a residence near the sea-coast. The descriptions are so realistic that we feel it would be possible for one who had never seen the sea to lay down one of those volumes and really fancy he smelt the salt air from the marshes.

"A Marsh Island" is a perfect gem. The simple home life of the farm-house is told in so genuine and picturesque a manner that we are thoroughly acquainted with the character of each inmate. The broad charity of the writer is apparent in the fact that each character in her books presents at least one or more good qualities.

Artistically, "A Country Doctor" is probably not so perfect, but it is stronger in conception, and we can readily see how perfectly conversant with the subject she could be. It is one of the choice books which while away leisure hours with agreeable thoughts and fancies. Our interest in the characters is not only in what they do, but in the manner in which it is set forth.

Another characteristic of Miss Jewett is the fact that she finds a perfect inspiration in an old deserted house, or in a family which has seen "better days." This we clearly see in some of her short stories.

She also has a sense of humor. We find it displayed in the description of a country funeral, and while reading notice no incongruity.

Miss Jewett had varied her writing of short stories, that difficult achievement which she has acquired so well, with poetical composition. If all her printed poems were collected they would make a good-sized volume. The poems are calm and contemplative rather than passionate.

In all her works however we can plainly see that out-door life with her is a passion. She lives in the closest companionship with nature, and generously allows her hosts of admiring friends to share this natural heritage, by interpreting the voices of the woods and the splash of the sea, through a mind and heart deeply imbued with the wisdom and love of God, and anxious that every one should follow her example by getting the most out of this life.

She does not neglect the young. "Betty Leicester" and "Play Days" are among the best stories for young people that we have ever seen.

DEVOTED EXCLUSIVELY TO THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL LIBRARY.
GOODENOUGH & WOGLOM CO., Publishers, 122 Nassau St., New York.
NEW YORK, JUNE, 1894.

Harriet Prescott Spofford, "Sarah Orne Jewett," The Book Buyer 11:7 (August 1894), 329-330.

SARAH ORNE JEWETT.

THE secret of Sarah Jewett's great success in her work, outside of its artistic perfection, is the spirit of loving kindness and tender mercy that pervades it. And that is perhaps because the same spirit also pervades herself. She loves her kind, and has the warmest interest in the movements of those about her.

The circumstances of her life have been such as to foster this love. The child of a country doctor (than whom no one stands in closer relation to the countryside), she early went about with him in his long drives, and was admitted to an intimacy with the lives of people, hardly otherwise attainable – an intimacy revealed on every page of her stories. Something of the character of this wise and kind father, who never lost a chance of teaching her how to observe, and whose name, Theodore Herman Jewett, has a descriptive charm, she has painted in her story of "The Country Doctor." But elsewhere she says: "My father had inherited from his father an amazing knowledge of human nature, and from his mother's French ancestry that peculiarly French trait call gaiet? de cœur. Through all the heavy responsibilities and anxieties of his busy professional life, this kept him young at heart and cheerful. His visits to his patients were often made delightful and refreshing to them by his kind heart, and the charm of his personality. I knew many of the patients whom he used to visit in lonely inland farms or on the sea-coast in York and Wells. I used to follow him about silently, like an undemanding little dog, content to follow at his heels. I had no consciousness of watching or listening, or indeed of any special interest in the country interiors. In fact, when the time came that my own world of imagination was more real to me than any other, I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to certain points of interest in the character or surroundings of our acquaintances. I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself, in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now, as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said, and the sights he made me see. He was only impatient with affectation and insincerity." He could never have been impatient with Sarah, then; for absolute simplicity and sincerity are among her chief characteristics.

Her delicate health, as a child, obliged her to be much outdoors; and in the large old town at the head of tide-water, in the Agamenticus region, she had every facility for acquiring a knowledge of nature and of people; here she attended the academy, and found it easy to write verse and hard to write prose; and here she heard the graphic dialect of the country store and of the wharf, ran with the other children to mount the logging team from the woods and ride into town over the creaking snow, and met at her grandfather's the weather-bronzed ship-masters, who brought, to the children's much satisfaction, store of oranges, and pineapples, and filberts, and big jars of olives and tamarinds, and brought something better yet for the hungry imaginations in their stories of the islands of the sea, of the "great storms on the Atlantic, and winds that blew them north-about." The place was full of tradition; here she listened to many a strange recital regarding the privateers of the war of 1812, whose crews were shipped all alongshore; regarding the Revolution, in which her mother's people, the Gilmans of Exeter, took the rebels' part, but her father's ancestors could not forsake allegiance to the dear mother country; and regarding the yet older and sadder days of the French and Indian wars. And here, hardly more than a child, she was a writer for the Young Folks and The Riverside; and at nineteen sent her first sketch to the Atlantic Monthly, where her genius was at once recognized and encouraged. She has published many volumes since then, and her work has been translated into a foreign tongue, but nowhere is it loved so much as at home, where we have the same somewhat tender feeling for its faithfulness and finish, its humor and pathos, that we have for our family portraits.

Surely no one ever had a finer training for work than she had in this ancient town of South Berwick, called by its own people Barvick, after the Norse fashion, where she was born in a colonial house built a hundred and fifty years ago and untouched by modern hands. The old hip-roofed mansion among its lofty trees, whose paneled hall with its wide arch, and ample staircase and huge door opening into greenery beyond, give one the very ideal of hospitable welcome, is still her home, and she has the heartiest affection for it. "I was born here," she said once, "and I hope to die here, leaving the lilac bushes still green and growing, and all the chairs in their places." Although she spends a good part of her time here, she is very often the favored sharer of Annie Fields's home, in the historic house on Charles Street in Boston, and where the eagle's eyrie of Thunderbolt Hill has been transformed into a nest of flowers in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She has travelled much in American, and has made several visits abroad; but she always says she has taken no greater delight in these journeyings than in the rides and tramps within the borders of old Berwick. I like to think of her the guest of Tennyson, as he takes in his hands the crystal sphere she wears on her watch-chain, and surveys the stately grace and dark beauty of the American girl – as if we had sent her to the old poet as our best and finest. I like even better to think of her in the old forest of Barbizon, the haunt of Millet, between whose work and her own a subtile resemblance lies, and where the French blood in her veins gives her a certain right of place. Perhaps it is this foreign strain which lends such an attraction to her manner, a manner that combines a height of delicate refinement and cordial artlessness which both fires your fancy and warms your heart. When you see her with her lofty carriage, her dark eyes, her high-bred and beautiful features, you remember the royal significance of her name in Scripture, and you are half inclined to wonder how it is that a princess of the régime is writing stories that are the accurate transcript of the lives of peasants. But when, if by rare fortune, you hear her read from her own pages, with a voice like a soft south wind, and with a quaint and lovely air that is all her own, then you know that these stories of hers are written from the heart that beats for humbler, homelier people as if with the same blood.

Harriet Prescott Spofford.

From Horace Scudder, "Half a Dozen Story-Books. " The Atlantic Monthly 76: 456 (October 1895), pp. 558-9.

In her volume of tales of New England life [Meadow-Grass. Boston, 1895], Miss Brown has kept away from plated cities or any composite society. Her village of Tiverton and the neighboring market town of Sudleigh furnish scene enough for the play of her country folk, and in the varying fortunes of the figures she brings forward there is room for a wide gamut of emotional notes. In her first sketch, Number Five, she introduces the reader to a few of the village worthies in a careless, happy fashion, and in her last, Strollers in Tiverton, she gives free vent to a mood which now and again is present in the dozen stories which make up the rest of the volume, -- a mood which is the stirring of gypsy blood in the veins. There is a character, Dilly Joyce, who is a potential witch, and it is clear that Miss Brown's heart goes out to her as to scarcely any other of her creations; yet not in Dilly Joyce alone, nor in Molly McNeil or Nance Pete, does she betray her love of freedom and sunshine and the wind of heaven, but throughout the book there is a motion, a light, joyous tread, which gives Meadow-Grass a subtle attraction not to be found, we venture to say, in any other collection of New England tales. Mrs. Stowe sometimes catches the spirit, but there is a carelessness about her work which does not heighten the art. Miss Jewett never quite parts with that air of fine breeding which gives grace and beauty to her work, and makes her characters the objects of a compassion born of fuller knowledge than they possess of themselves. Mrs. Slosson has caught at the grotesque side of New England life and interprets it with a poetic charity. Miss Wilkins has the genius which concentrates the very essence of the life in her marvelously pointed sketches. Mr. Robinson has fixed one or two types of outdoor human life with precision and a hearty sympathy with traditional masculine rusticity. But it has remained for Miss Brown to enter this same general field of New England country life, and without producing any new variety of tale, or scarcely any new character, to use familiar material, and yet illumine it with a new light. We cannot define it any more closely than by saying that the genuine humor which pervades the best of her work is closely identified with a love of sunshine, of growing things, and of movement in nature and the corresponding changes of light and shade in the human soul. There is a little story in this volume, Farmer Eli's Vacation, which is a masterpiece. The emotion which may exist under an impassive exterior is brought to light with a grace, a restraint of words and dignity of art, yet with a naturalness of narrative, that leave nothing to be desired. Nor will one readily forget the inimitable stories already printed in The Atlantic, Hearts-ease, and Joint Owners in Spain. Now and then, as in Bankrupt, and At Sudleigh Fair, Miss Brown possibly forces a note too much, and seems to fall back a little on conventional resources; but the entire effect of the book is of a natural beauty, springing spontaneously and finding most apt expression. Above all, as we have intimated, there is a true wild-wood flavor, a rusticity which is not a mere foil to civility.

From Fred Lewis Patee, A History of American Literature. New York: Silver, Burdett, & Co., 1896.

Studies of New England Life. – But the greater part of Miss Phelps' work has been the sketching with intense colors, on a New England background, of exquisite miniatures over a thinly concealed moral. She is one of the leading figures in the little group of women that has done in prose for New England humble life what Whittier did in verse. Few literary fields have been worked with more painstaking care or with richer results. Mrs. Stowe is the leader of the group. Among its other members are ROSE TERRY COOKE (1827-1892), who has caught as no one else has the grim humor underlying New England life and character; JANE G. AUSTIN (1831-1894), whose faithful studies of early colonial days are a real addition to American Literature; Sarah Orne Jewett, who merits a more extended notice; and MARY E. WILKINS (b. 1862), whose accurate characterizations have made her one of the strongest of the later school of writers. Nearly all of these are at their best in short sketches, -- "thumb-nail studies" of life and character. In this field they have created some of the most original and valuable work that has been added of late years to our literature.

No one of the group has written stronger or more finished work than Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. She excels in studies of humble life in the fishing villages of Massachusetts. Jack the Fisherman and The Madonna of the Tubs are prose idyls which are well-nigh faultless in conception and execution. All of her work is intense and earnest. Many of her books are sermons against intemperance and kindred evils. That she is extravagant at times in her rhetoric, and too emotional and strained in some of her pictures, can be overlooked in view of the spontaneousness of her message, and the strength and delicacy of her literary art.

In 1889 Miss Phelps became the wife of Herbert D. Ward, a son of the editor of The Independent, and, in collaboration with her husband, she has produced several novels dealing with Biblical scenes and characters. These, however, are inferior works. Her autobiographical study, Chapters from a Life, is full of delightful glimpses of her early environment, and the group of writers which made the middle of the century notable in New England.

"Sarah O. Jewett portrays the ancient, decadent, respectable, gentle, and winsome seaboard town, and tells of the life therein." – Richardson.

The novelist of the northern New England coast, as Celia Thaxter is its poet, is Sarah Orne Jewett of South Berwick, Maine, a little country village not far from the Isles of Shoals. All of that interesting region about Portsmouth, and Kittery, and York, with its odors of the ocean, its traditions of better days, its historic family mansions fast going to decay, and its peculiar types of character, Miss Jewett knows by heart. She has traversed it in every part, and studied faithfully all of its types and characteristics. Her father, a physician of more than local fame, from her childhood had taken her with him on his professional rounds, often beguiling the time with tales of family history, anecdotes of his practice, and characterizations of the peculiar people that he had met during his long experience as a country doctor. The impressionable young novelist could have had no better training for her future work. Her first tales of village life, contributed to the leading magazines, won for her at once an appreciative audience which has steadily increased until the present day.

Miss Jewett, like most of her school of writers, is at her best in the short sketch of life and character. Her plots are slight; she is seldom analytic; she deals more with individual peculiarities than with the universal experiences of life, but in the portrayal of these individuals and their peculiar surroundings, she shows a wonderful power. Her delicate humor, her mastery of dialogue, her simple, limpid style which has been compared even to Hawthorne's, and her fidelity to nature combine to give her work a peculiar strength and charm. Her sketches are as minute in detail and as graphic in treatment as Flemish pictures. Every feature of the Kittery coast – rock, headland, tree, river, and country village – stands out clear and sharp, while her characters seem to live and breathe before us. The readers of her sketches are few who will not agree with James Russell Lowell, that "Nothing more pleasingly characteristic of rural life in New England has been written."

1897

From F. V. N. Painter, Introduction to American literature, including illustrative selections.

Boston: Leach, Shewell & Sanborn, 1897, pp. 253 – 258

PROMINENT WRITERS.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (born 1837). Began as a writer of verse. For a number of years editor of Atlantic Monthly. "The Undiscovered Country," "A Fearful Responsibility," "A Modern Instance," and "A Woman 's Reason" are among his best works, to which may be added a series of farce dramas, including "The Mouse Trap," "The Parlor Car," "The Register," etc.

HENRY JAMES (born 1843). Critic and novelist. Originated the class of fiction know as "international" or "transatlantic," and a leader of the realistic school of novelists. Author of "Daisy Miller," "The Portrait of a Lady," "The American," "French Poets and Novelists," etc.

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN (born 1833). Poet and critic. Author of "The Doorstep," "Alice of Monmouth," "The Victorian Poets," "Poets of America," etc.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD (born 1825). Poet and critic. Author of "The Late English Poets," "Loves and Heroines of the Poets," "The Dead Master," "Hymns to the Sea," etc.

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (born 1836). A writer of interesting stories and lyric verse. Author of "Babie Bell," "The Face Against the Pane," and many society poems; also "The Story of a Bad Boy," "Marjorie Daw and Other People," "Prudence Palfrey," "Stillwater Tragedy," etc.

RICHARD WATSON GILDER (born 1844). Editor of the Century, and writer of polished verse. First volume of poetry, "The New Day," appeared in 1875, followed by "The Celestial Passion," and "Lyrics."

FRANCIS BRET HARTE (born 1838). Editor, poet, and story-teller of the Rocky Mountains. "The Heathen Chinee" acquired for its author immediate fame. Among his numerous works may be mentioned "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," "Wiggles," "The Story of a Mine," "Maruja, a Novel," etc.

J. T. TROWBRIDGE (born 1827). A popular novelist and poet. Author of "Phil and His Friends," a story for boys, "Laurence's Adventures," "Coupon Bonds," etc. His best-known poems are "The Vagabonds," "The Charcoal-Man," and "Farmer John."

RICHARD GRANT WHITE (1821-1885). Shakespearian critic and scholar. Author of "Life of Shakespeare," "Words and their Uses," and "Every-Day English."

CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (born 1829). Editor, critic, and essayist of rare humor and critical acumen. Has written "My Summer in a Garden," "Back-Log Studies," "Being a Boy," and other delightful sketches.

E. P. WHIPPLE (1819-1886). Lecturer and essayist. Wrote "Literature and Life," "Character and Characteristic Men," "The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth," etc.

JOHN FISKE (1842). Historian and philosopher. Chief works devoted to the study of the origin and progress of the human race. Author of "The Destiny of Man," "The Idea of God," "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," etc.

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE (1810-1888). Unitarian clergyman. Author of "Orthodoxy: its Truths and Errors," "Ten Great Religions, " and may other religious works of great excellence. In collaboration with Emerson and Channing he prepared the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli."

EDWARD EVERETT HALE (born 1822). Essayist, lecturer, historian, and preacher. Very active in all movements of reform. Well known abroad by his short stories, as well as several longer works. Author of "The Man Without a Country," "In His Name," "Ten Times One is Ten," etc.

FRANK R. STOCKTON (born 1834). A humorous and original writer of short stories. Author of "The Lady or the Tiger," "Tales out of School," for children, "Rudder Grange," "The Stories of the Three Burglars," "The Hundredth Man," etc.

F. MARION CRAWFORD (born 1854). Son of an American sculptor; resides in Italy. Our most popular novelist abroad. Author of "Mr. Isaacs," "A Roman Singer," and the Saracinesca trio, including "Saracinesca," "Sant' Ilario," and "Don Orsino."

ROSE TERRY COOKE (born 1827). Poet and story-writer. Author of "Happy Dodd," "Somebody's Neighbors," "The Sphinx's Children and Other People's," "Poems," etc.

MARGARET DELAND (born 1857). Author of "The Old Garden and Other Verses," "John Ward, Preacher," a popular novel dealing with theological questions, "Philip and His Wife," etc.

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT (born 1849). A story-writer. Those most widely known are "That Lass o' Lowrie's," "A Fair Barbarian," "Little Lord Fauntleroy," "Sara Crewe," "Editha's Burglar," etc.

HJALMER HJORTH BOYESEN (1848-1896). A writer of verse and stories of Norwegian life. Principal works are "Gunnar, a Norse Romance," "Falconberg," "Ilka on the Hill-Top," etc.

LEWIS WALLACE (born 1827). Statesman, soldier, and writer of thrilling stories. Author of "The Fair God," "The Prince of India," and "Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ."

JULIAN HAWTHORNE (born 1846). Son of the great novelist. Among his novels are "Garth," "Prince Saroni's Wife," "Fortune's Fool," "Dust," etc. He has also written "Confessions and Criticisms," and "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography."

EDWARD PAYSON ROE (1838-1887). Clergyman and writer of popular but commonplace novels. Among them may be mentioned "Opening a Chestnut Burr," "Barriers Burned Away," "Nature's Serial Story," etc.

SARAH ORNE JEWETT (born 1849). Writer of stories treating chiefly of New England life and character. Some of her novels are "Deephaven," "Old Friends and New," "Country By-Ways," "A White Heron," etc.

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD (born 1844). Poet and story-writer. Among her numerous and excellent works are "Men, Women, and Ghosts," "The Story of Avis," "Old Maid's Paradise," "The Gates Ajar," "Beyond the Gates," etc.

CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON (1848-1894). Grandniece of Cooper, and popular writer of stories, sketches, and poems. Author of "Castle Nowhere," "Rodman the Keeper," "Anne," "East Angels," etc.

GEORGE W. CABLE (born 1844). Writes of Creole life. Author of "Old Creole Days," "Madame Delphine," "Bonaventure," "The Grandissimes," etc.

THOMAS NELSON PAGE (born 1853). A popular writer of negro-dialect stories. His best-known works are "In Ole Virginia," "Two Little Confederates," "Marse Chan," "Meh Lady," etc.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (born 1848). Editor, and writer of negro folklore stories, "Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings," "Nights with Uncle Remus," "Free Joe," etc.

RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON (Born 1822). Author of "The Dukesborough Tales," a series of short stories of Georgia "Cracker" life.

MARY NOAILLES MURFREE ("CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK") (born 1850). Writes of the mountaineers of Tennessee. Author of "The Prophet of the Great Smokey Mountains," "In the Tennessee Mountains," "In the Clouds," etc.

EDWARD EGGLESTON (born 1837). Preacher, historian, and novelist. Author of "The Hoosier Schoolmaster," "The Hoosier Schoolboy," "Roxy," "A History of Life in the United States," etc.

JOHN BURROUGHS (born 1837). Literary naturalist. Wrote "Wake Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Indoor Studies," etc.

CHARLES F. BROWNE ("ARTEMUS WARD") (1834-1867). Comic lecturer, and author of "Artemus Ward, His Book," "Artemus Ward in London," etc.

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS ("MARK TWAIN") (born 1835). Humorist and story-writer. Author of "Innocents Abroad," "Roughing It," "A Tramp Abroad," "Tom Sawyer," etc.

HORACE E. SCUDDER (born 1838). Editor, and popular writer of works for children. Wrote "Seven Little People," "Dream Children," "Stories from My Attic," "The Bodley Books," etc.

A. D. T. WHITNEY (born 1824). Author of works for young people, including "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life," "Faith Gartney's Girlhood," "We Girls," etc.

LOUISA M. ALCOTT (1832-1888). Author of "Little Women," "Little Men," "An Old-Fashioned Girl," "Jack and Jill," etc.

EUGENE FIELD (1850-1896). Journalist, story-writer , and poet. Author of "Culture's Garden," "A Little Book of Western Verse," "A Little Book of Profitable Tales," etc.

LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON (born 1835). Story-writer, essayist, and poet. Principal works are "Bed-Time Stories," for children, "Swallow Flights, and Other Poems," "Juno Clifford," "Some Women's Hearts," etc.

JOHN ESTEN COOKE (1830-1886). Soldier, and author of a number of romances founded on early life in Virginia and on the events of the Civil War. Principal works are "Henry St. John," "Surrey of Eagle's Nest," "Hilt to Hilt," etc.

MARY V. TERHUNE ("MARION HARLAND") (born 1830). Editor, novelist, and writer on domestic economy. Her novels include "Alone," "Miriam," "Judith," etc.

AUGUSTA J. EVANS (born 1835). Southern novelist. Author of "St. Elmo," "Beulah," "Vashti," etc.

MARY A. DODGE ("GAIL HAMILTON") (1838-1896). A writer of much vigor. Author of "Woman's Wrongs," "Gala Days," "Country Living," "A New Atmosphere," etc.

ABRAM J. RYAN (1839-1886). A Catholic priest and poet. Author of a volume of "Poems," widely read in the South.

CINCINNATUS HEINE MILLER ("JOAQUIN MILLER"). (born 1841). "Poet of the Sierras." Has written many stories, sketches, and poems, chiefly "Songs of the Sierras," and "Songs of the Sun Lands."

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY (Born 1853). Commonly known as "The Hoosier Poet," his best poems being written in the Indiana or Hoosier dialect. Author of "The Old Swimmin' Hole," "The Boss Girl, and Other Sketches," "Character Sketches and Poems," etc.

CHARLES G. LELAND (born 1824). Author of many books on literary subjects, and a series of studies in German-American dialect called the "Hans Breitmann's Ballads."

WILL CARLETON (born 1845). Author of "Farm Ballads," "City Ballads," "Farm Legends," and "City Legends." Best-known pieces, "The New Organ," "Betsey and I are Out," etc.

SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881). Critic, musician, and poet. Author of "Tiger-Lilies," a novel of the war, "The Science of English Verse," "The Marshes of Glynn," "Sunrise," "Corn," etc.

PAUL H. HAYNE (1831-1886). "The laureate of South Carolina," Wrote "Face to Face," "Love's Autumn," "Earth's Odors After Rain," etc.

MAURICE THOMPSON (born 1844). Critic, essayist, novelist, and poet. Author of "Songs of Fair Weather," "Sylvan Secrets," "Byways and Birdnotes," "A Tallahassee Girl," "A Fortnight of Folly," etc.

HENRY TIMROD (1829-1867). A writer of war lyrics, among them "A Mother's Wail," and "Spring."

ALICE CARY (1820-1870). A poet and prose writer. Author of "Thanksgiving," "Pictures of Memory," "The Bridal Veil," etc.

PHŒBE CARY (1825-1871). Sister of Alice Carey. Wrote many poems, but is best known as the author of the hymn "One Sweetly Solemn Thought."

HELEN HUNT JACKSON (1831-1885). Author of "Verses," and several delightful stories, including "Bits of Travel," "A Century of Dishonor," and "Ramona," a novel written in the interest of the Indian.

EMMA LAZARUS (1849-1887). Poet and novelist. Her most striking work is "The Dance to Death," a drama representing the persecution of the Jews in the twelfth century. Also wrote "Songs of a Semite," and "Alide," a romance.

MARGARET J. PRESTON. A story-writer and poet. Principal works are "Silverwood," a novel, "Old Songs and New," "Cartoons," "Colonial Ballads," etc.

LUCY LARCOM (1826-1893). From a mill-hand she rose to be teacher, editor, and poet. Wrote "Similitudes," "Childhood Songs," "Wild Roses from Cape Anne," etc.

CELIA THAXTER (1836-1894). Wrote of the sea. Author of "Among the Isles of Shoals" and "Drift-Weed," "Poems for Children," etc.

EDITH M. THOMAS (born 1854). A popular poet, and contributor to magazines. Wrote "A New Year's Masque, and Other Poems," "The Round Year," and "Lyrics and Sonnets."

There are many other writers that deserve mention here; but any attempt at completeness would extend this list too far.

Jewett listed among prominent New England authors of short stories.
from Early History of Children's Books in New England, by Charles Welsh: pp. 147-161
The New England Magazine. New Series 20: 2 (April 1899): 147-161.

And it is the proud distinction of New England that well-nigh all that is best and most popular in American literature for children has been produced by her sons and daughters. It will be sufficient to cite such names as T. B. Aldrich, Louisa Alcott, John S. C. Abbott, W. T. Adams (Oliver Optic), Jane Andrews, Hezekiah Butterworth, Lydia Maria Child, C. C. Coffin, James Abbott Goodrich, E. E. Hale, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett, Elijah Kellogg, H. W. Longfellow, Kirk Monroe, Laura E. (Howe) Richards, Horace E. Scudder, J. T. Trowbridge, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eliza Orne White, Mary E. Wilkins and Charles Dudley Warner, to say nothing of a host of others. (148).

From "Books and Authors," The Living Age 227: 2935 (October 6, 1900), p. 71.

A new “creel” of Irish stories by Jane Barlow, entitled “From the Land of the Shamrock,” is promised by Dodd, Mead & Co. It will be awaited with pleasurable expectations by all who have enjoyed the charming humor and tenderness of Miss Barlow’s “Irish Idyls.” Miss Barlow is the Sarah Orne Jewett of Ireland.

William I. Cole, "Maine in Literature," The New England Magazine NS 22:6 (Aug 1900) pp. 726-743.

From p. 741
In South Berwick, situated near the dividing line between Maine and New Hampshire, Sarah Orne Jewett was born, grew up, and still passes much of her time. It is easy to believe that the region in which South Berwick lies, constituting as it does the border land between the country and the seashore, and including the old seaport towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, has furnished the background for many of her familiar stories of New England life and character. Where else but in Maine would one look, also, for "The Country of the Pointed Firs," with such scenery and people as she describes with so much faithfulness and delicacy? Thus even more closely than as the state of her birth is Miss Jewett identified with Maine through the successful pictures that she has given in her stories of its rural types and characteristic scenes.

From William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances: A Person Retrospect of American Authorship.
New York: Harper, 1901, Chapter 4: Literary Boston as I Knew It, pp. 117-118.

The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure, the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was imperfect -- and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its imperfections -- it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it. They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work, achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself.

From William Dean Howells, "Some Anomalies of the Short Story."
North American Review 173 (September 1901): 422-432.
From parts V-VI, pp. 430-31.
V.

It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the very farce, which it may quantitatively excel. We can all recall by name many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters out of short stories can we recall? Most persons of the drama give themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhaps oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of its characterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greater facilities for repetition and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on the imagination than the narrative form in the same small space. The narrative must give to description what the drama trusts to representation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency of the dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, for they remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays. It is possible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will become more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and with lasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember by name any of the people in them. I may be risking too much in offering an instance, but who, in even such signal instances as "The Revolt of Mother," by Miss Wilkins, or "The Dulham Ladies," by Miss Jewett, can recall by name the characters that made them delightful.

The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with creations of as much immortality as we can reasonable demand. The structural change would not be greater than the moral or material change which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same things over and over again. Now it has not only varied the persons and things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms the vehicle of reality and spirituality. When one thinks of a bit of Mr. James' psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives the immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the height it has reached. It serves equally the ideal and the real; that which it is loth to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories which have recently made reputations for their authors, very few are of that peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic. The only distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think of is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so imperative as to be almost a condition of fiction. I am never so enamored of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell against it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short stories has more than any other supplied us with memorable types and characters. We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember "Kentuck" and "Tennessee's Partner," at least by nickname; and we remember their several qualities. These figures, if we cannot quite consent that they are persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator's imagination, and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do, out of the myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out of Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich's famous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James' Daisy Miller.

From William Dean Howells, Puritanism in Fiction, in Literature and Life: Studies.
New York: Harper's, 1902, pp. 278-283.

THE question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression of reality does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one of those inquiries to which there is no very final answer. The most baffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident; and if you go about to prove them you are in some danger of shaking the convictions of those whom they have persuaded. It will not do to affirm anything wholesale concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrary present themselves if you know the ground, and you are left in doubt of the verity which you cannot gainsay. The most that you can do is to appeal to your own consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else. Perhaps the best test in this difficult matter is the quality of the art which created the picture. Is it clear, simple, unaffected? Is it true to human experience generally? If it is so, then it cannot well be false to the special human experience it deals with.

She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of these stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous, conscientious, deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and no doubt this cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows. Without being so very young, I, too, have found the humor hardly enough at times, and if one has not the habit of experiencing support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote New England village, at nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and in quite the mood that Miss Wilkins's bleaker studies leave one in. At mid-day, or in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible to fling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the fiction; and I have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying this or that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins house and in placing one of her muted dramas in it. One cannot know the people of such places without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot know New England without owning the fidelity of her stories to New England character, though, as I have already suggested, quite another sort of stories could be written which should as faithfully represent other phases of New England village life.

To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no means confident that their truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature is seldom on show anywhere. I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoy and Tourguénief to Russian life, yet I should not be surprised if I went through Russia and met none of their people. I should be rather more surprised if I went through Italy and met none of Verga's or Fogazzaro's, but that would be because I already knew Italy a little. In fact, I suspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes only to the connoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the artist himself. One must not be too severe in challenging the truth of an author to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of patience to the scrutiny. Types are very backward and shrinking things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if you seize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that is distinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author's reputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of his truth.

As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now so Puritanical as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet the inherited Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences it from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. There was, however, always a revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest and securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. There is also a sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for it), which awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence from the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New England manners. It is often a last state of Unitarianism, which prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Calvinistic theology ceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism so common in New England, and, in fact, everywhere in America. Then, there is a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villages which has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and which forms with us an author's closest appreciation, if not his best. But as yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exalted beauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one can always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period. Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losing itself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large. The good causes, the generous causes, are first befriended there, and in a wholesome sort the New England culture, as well as the New England conscience, has imparted itself to the American people.

Even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves to have in such excellent degree, has spread from New England. That is, indeed, the home of the American short story, and it has there been brought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of Miss Brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs. Rose Terry Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture of New England village life in some of its more obvious phases. I say obvious because I must, but I have already said that this is a life which is very little obvious; and I should not blame any one who brought the portrait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, and unnatural, though I should be perfectly sure that such a critic was wrong.

From Lorenzo Sears, American Literature in the Colonial and National Period.
Boston, Little, Brown, and Company (1902), pp. 414-415

Of New England peculiarities and dialect there have been many portrayers. Given to literary enterprises the province has not failed to ransack its own neighborhood to find material for fiction. The back country has been as thoroughly explored for quaint characters and queer words as for old clocks and chairs. Hard and sharp men and women, clinging to remote traditions and mispronunciations, not because they do not know better, but for fear of being inconsistent and new-fangled, have been shown up in striking contrast to shiftless neighbors who have been born tired of the two-century strain after primness. No one has done this better than Miss Wilkins in her books and sketches of a frosty life, which she did not have to go far to find. A richer and more mellow town life has been depicted in appropriate colors by Miss Jewett in numerous books, which exhibit the variety that exists in character, cultivation, and manner of living in a province which is fast becoming unprovincial. This larger life, dealing with vital issues and progressive ideas, enters into the work of other writers who deserve more extended mention, notably Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, and others beside.

So also in all the circuit of prairie, coast, and mountain there are writers who stand near the great colorists that have been enumerated, each depicting the group he knows best, and all contributing to a wide and picturesque view of cosmopolitan life on the continent. Fireside travellers may traverse it from the northern lakes to the southern gulf and from ocean to ocean in a local fiction, which has been made so faithful to scenery, dialect, and character that the wide reader should know any state if carried into it blindfolded as soon as he has eyes to see and ears to hear. He might not be as certain of his ground as the Nantucket skipper was of "Marm Hackett's garden," but he ought to "guess" or "allow" or "reckon" where he is within five hundred miles, when he hears these provincialisms and others like them. A few samples of soil are offered on which the reader of local fiction can test his skill.

From Charles Dudley Warner, editor, Library of the World's Best Literature.
New York: Hill, 1902, vol. 21, pp. 8269-71.

THE deeds of young authors, like the deeds of young soldiers, are a continual surprise to the mature. We forget that characters and situations which pass before us unheeded from their very familiarity, strike the apprehension of youth from their very novelty.

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849; a product of the best New England birth and breeding. Besides the usual school training, she received a deeper culture from her father, a physician and a man of wide attainments and keen observation. A country doctor, he had to make excursions inland and along-shore to visit his scattered patients; and the young girl sitting beside him learned to know the characters she was to immortalize in literature, as she knew the landscape and the sky. She was a girl not past her youth when her first book, 'Deephaven,' was published in 1877. This was a story of New England life, told in the form of an autobiography; and slight as it was in incident, betrayed a breadth and a refinement which seemed to come from careful training, but which were really the unerring product of a genuine gift for literature, kindled by the observation of a fresh mind and an affectionate sympathy.

The effect upon her many readers was like the gift of sight to the blind. Frequenters of the town – for 'Deephaven' stands for any fisher village on the Maine coast – recollected having seen "Mrs. Bonny" searching for a tumbler, the meek widow with the appearance of a black beetle and the wail of a banshee, the funeral procession on its sad journey, the Captains, the interesting ladies "Mrs. Kew" and "Mrs. Dockum." 'Deephaven' was followed by a series of stories, all breathing forth an air of calm leisure that in its avoidance of hurry or catastrophe suggests the almost forgotten note of Goldsmith and Irving.

Miss Jewett's portrayal of character, habits, traits, speech, was all perfectly true, although drawn from that very rural and village New England life which other writers, clever and merciless, had convinced the world to be wholly sordid and melancholy. With wider comprehension, she showed that there are differing points of view of any given conditions, and that a life in these pinched and narrow surroundings may be as complex as affair as one passed in the heart of London. Her patriotic and kindly part was to portray it with a good deal of horizon, a clear sky, and vital human interest.

Her gift has been exercised, for the most part, in the field in which America has only France as her rival, -- that of the short story. She has written one novel, 'A Country Doctor'; -- for 'Deephaven' is a series of figures, landscapes, and interiors, rather than a woven scheme. Perhaps the rare intuition which taught her the secrets of her shy reserved characters, revealed to her that her strength does not lie in the constructive power which holds in its grasp varied and complex interests, terminating in an inevitable conclusion.

A simple incident suffices for her machinery; her local color is a part of the substance of her creation, not imposed upon it, and no more than Hawthorne does she seem to be conscious of the necessity of making it a setting for her figures. She writes of that into which she was born; and her creations – even when they are in such foreign settings as Irish-American life, in the inimitable stories 'The Luck of the Bogans [The Brogans],' 'Between Mass and Vespers,' and 'A Little Captive Maid' – glow with that internal personality which is never counterfeited, as has been said of Hawthorne's 'Marble Faun.'

The emotion of love as a passion, the essential of a novel, is almost absent from her sketches; or, treated as one of many other emotions and principles, has a certain originality due to its abstemiousness. Life indeed, as portrayed by her, proceeds so exactly as it would naturally proceed, that when the incident has been told, and the quiet, veracious talk has been retailed, the story comes to an end because it could not go on without being a different story. This method would not do for a novel: and yet, little composition as there seems to be about them, Miss Jewett's stories are as delicately constructed, with as true a method and as perfect a knowledge of technique, as Guy de Maupassant's; and they are permeated with a humor he never knew. "It is not only the delightful mood in which these little masterpieces are written," says Mr. Howells of 'The King of Folly Island,' "but the perfect artistic restraint, the truly Greek temperance without one touch too much, which render them exquisite, make them perfect in their way."

Her lovely spirit, sweet and compassionate, is a tacit appeal for the characters at which her humor bids us smile. Her people are introduced sitting in their quiet New England homes, going about their small affairs: housewives, captains unseaworthy through time or stress of weather, the village schoolmistress or seamstress, the old soldier, the heroine with blue eyes and rosy cheeks, walking through the scene without one fluttering ribbon of coquetry, -- all these appear with as little grouping as if we had walked into "Deephaven" or "Winby" itself. With perfect sympathy she takes under her protection all those whom irreverence or thoughtlessness had flouted, or whom personal peculiarities have made ridiculous. With her we are amused by their quaintness; but human nature, even forlorn and fallen human nature, is dignified into its true likeness under her serene and compassionate touch. Her charm is the charm which Richard Dale [Dole] found in "A Marsh Island," where he was so willingly a prisoner; and is that which comes from the view of a landscape, broad, unaccented, lying under a summer sky, breathing the fragrance of grass and wild flowers. It does not invite criticism any more than it deprecates close scrutiny.

If artist may be compared with artist, Miss Jewett may be described as a water-colorist; her sketches resting for their value not upon dramatic qualities or strong color, but upon their pure tone and singleness of effort. And she is not sensibly in her story, any more than a painter is in his picture. It is in this that her engaging modesty and admirable self-restraint lie.

Miss Jewett is the author of a dozen volumes of fiction, among the more important of which are – 'A Marsh Island' (1885); 'A White Heron and Other Stories' (1886); 'The King of Folly Island, and Other People' (1888); 'Strangers and Wayfarers' (1890); 'A Native of Winby, and Other Tales' (1893); 'The Life of Nancy' (1895); and 'The Country of the Pointed Firs,' 1896.

From E. F. Hawkins and C. H. L. Johnston. Little Pilgrimages Among Women Who Have Written Famous Books.

Boston: Page, 1902, pp. 43-58

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

ONCE upon a time some critic found a resemblance between Miss Jewett and one of the old Flemish painters -- found a resemblance between her stories and the groups of Jan van Eyck or Roger van der Weyden. He was a discerning critic, for her stories and the old masters' pictures are alike in many respects. They have a reality that is quite photographic, and yet they suggest a strong imagination. Their purity is remarkable, and yet their atmosphere is very earthly.

Better still, however, it seems to us, it would be to say that there is a strong resemblance between Miss Jewett and Jean Francois Millet. They both have dignified the meek and the lowly; they both have exhibited the tenderest sympathy with the plain sons of Adam and Eve that live far from the madding crowd; they both have done this noble and ennobling work enthusiastically yet unaffectedly, modestly but, ah! how artistically. They that take pleasure in "The Angelus," will take pleasure also in "Deephaven." Millet, too, knew his characters intimately; he had struggled and suffered like them. From such painful strenuousness Miss Jewett fortunately has been able to keep aloof, for Barbizon is not like South Berwick, and the French peasants would say that the countryfolk of Maine lived royally. But we have heard it said that Miss Jewett is like her books, and that in ten minutes she unconsciously tells you how she writes them.

Kate Sanborn once essayed a description of her friend and contemporary, in which she observed: "I feel a certain shrinking from attempting a personal sketch of this gifted woman, whom we all love for her absolutely perfect pictures of New England life." Anyone who essays the description must feel as Kate Sanborn felt, and yet, in such a case, a sketch poorly or inadequately done is better than no sketch at all. The lesson will be present, if not the eloquence. The old Flemish painters made portraits of themselves, but as yet, we hardly need say, Miss Jewett has given us no sketch of herself.

Sarah Orne Jewett was born at South Berwick, Maine, on September 3, 1849. Her father was Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett, a physician of no small renown; her mother was the daughter of Dr. Perry of Exeter, another physician well-known in central New England during the middle of the last century. The house in which she was born is still standing, although it was built far back in the eighteenth century, and it still excites the author's warmest affection. "I was born here," she said, as she stood in its panelled hall a few years ago, "and I hope to die here, leaving the lilac bushes still green and growing, and all the chairs in their places."

You will meet glimpses of Miss Jewett's father in "A Country Doctor," but the nearest and clearest glimpse is in his daughter's personal sketch of him:

"My father had inherited from his father an amazing knowledge of human nature, and from his mother's French ancestry that peculiarly French trait called gaieté de cœur. Through all the heavy responsibilities and anxieties of his busy professional life, this kept him young at heart and cheerful. His visits to his patients were often made delightful and refreshing to them by his kind heart, and the charm of his personality. I knew many of the patients whom he used to visit in lonely inland farms or on the sea-coast in York and Wells. I used to follow him about silently, like an undemanding little dog, content to follow at his heels. I had no consciousness of watching or listening, or indeed of any special interest in the country interiors. In fact, when the time came that my own world of imagination was more real to me than any other, I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to certain points of interest in the characters or surroundings of our acquaintances. I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself, in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said, and the sights he made me see. He was impatient only with affectation and insincerity."

Miss Jewett was a delicate child, and, consequently, was encouraged by her father to spend much of her time outdoors; and outdoors she formed her extraordinarily intimate acquaintance with nature and with the inhabitants of the Agamenticus region. She played even more eagerly than did the other children of the town, but when she went to school she readily outstripped her classmates. It is said that at the academy she found verse easy and prose difficult, but such conditions are not unusual. Youth takes naturally to rhymes and to games.

Once someone inquired of the author of "A Country Doctor" when the literary bent took possession of her. "I can scarcely say anything about that," she answered, "for I began to write so early. But my first serious encouragement was the acceptance of a short story by The Atlantic Monthly when I was between nineteen and twenty years old." That story was "Mr. Bruce," published in December, 1869.

We believe that Miss Jewett was about fourteen when she wrote "Lucy Garrow's [Garron's] Lovers." Between that age and the age when she was welcomed to The Atlantic Monthly she published little sketches in Young Folks and in The Riverside. Her first great popular success was "Deephaven," which appeared in 1877.

"Popular success" however, hardly expresses the reception of "Deephaven." "Artistic success" might be a fitter expression. The fact is, Miss Jewett's works are not popular, as Miss Johnston's, say, are popular. James Russell Lowell used the right words when, shortly before his death, he wrote to the London publishers of the New England author's books: "I am very glad to hear that Miss Jewett's delightful stories are to be reprinted in England. Nothing more pleasingly characteristic of rural life in New England has been written, and they have long been valued by the judicious here."

The same might be said to-day – "they have long been valued by the judicious here." No writer has a more devoted, more admiring public than the Bostonian. For we may call her a Bostonian, notwithstanding her loyalty to Berwick or Barwick, as the natives say. During the last quarter of a century she has been the almost inseparable companion of Mrs. James T. Fields, who loves Boston no less than the "judicious" Bostonians love and respect her. Back in 1882 the serene and noble Whittier addressed a sonnet to them as they set sail for Europe -- a sonnet interesting to quote:

Outbound your bark awaits you. Were I one

Whose prayer availeth much, my wish would be

Your favoring trade wind and consenting sea.

By sail or steed was never love outrun,

And, here or there, love follows her in whom

All graces and sweet charities unite,

The old Greek beauty set in holier light;

And her for whom New England's byways bloom,

Who walks among us welcome as the spring,

Calling up blossoms where her light feet stray.

God keep you both, make beautiful your way;

Comfort, console and bless; and safely bring,

Ere yet I wake upon a vaster sea

The unreturning voyage, my friends to me.

Whittier was accustomed to attend Friends' meetings in Berwick, and it was in the old town that he, typical of the old New England literary traditions, and Miss Jewett, the type of the newer, made each other's acquaintance! The sweet poet was greatly pleased by "Deephaven," and he heartily interested himself in its writers['] progress until he died.

Miss Jewett divides her time between Boston, Berwick and Manchester-by-the-Sea -- the same Manchester that prompted Dr. Holmes to write "Beverly-by-the-Depot." The larger part of her literary work is done in the old Maine settlement, to whose name, by the way, no South was prefixed originally. Plain Berwick it was known as in the lively, picturesque days, when bronze-faced sailors rolled barrels of rum up and boxes of tobacco and stranger wares down the north Atlantic wharves. From one who visited her in Maine a few years ago we gather this description of the Jewett homestead:

"It seems as if one had no right to say so much about a house which is a home. And yet New England has few like this, and it is a part of her brave history. There are few such broad, high halls, arched and panelled; few such wide stairways with carved and polished railings, few such quaint gilded mirrors and antique portraits and last century bedsteads with white canopies. . . Behind the house is a big old-fashioned garden, and every room is sweet with posies. There is a stable, too, for Miss Jewett loves her horses, and drives almost daily over the green hills . . . of the beautiful coast of Maine. She is an oars-woman as well, and her boat knows every reach of the river and all its quiet sunlit groves. . . Miss Jewett's "den" is the most delightful I have ever seen. It is in the upper hall, with a window looking down upon a tree-shaded village street. A desk strewn with papers is on one side, and on the other a case of books and a table. Pictures, flowers and books are everywhere. The room set apart for the library is one of the four great square ones downstairs. But the books overflow it. They lie upon the sofas, and have shelves in the bedrooms. It is the house of a woman who studies, Scott, particularly. . . "The busier I get," she said, "the more time I make to read the Waverley novels."

Mention of the "den" brings us up to Miss Jewett's method of working. She has moods; she does not make writing a set daily task, with so many pages to be done at a certain hour, as a Haverstraw laborer would have so many bricks. We have heard it said that sometimes her day's work amounts to eight or ten thousand words. That indeed would be a prodigious effort. Marion Crawford is one of the swiftest writers we ever heard of, and his ordinary limit is six thousand words a day. Possibly the truth about Miss Jewett's industry has been exaggerated. More reasonable is the statement that while engaged on a novel she pens from two to four thousand words a day. Between books she enjoys periods of physical recreation and literary construction.

"Of your own books, which do you like best?" Miss Jewett was once asked.

"They're a pretty large family now," and she smiled. "There are always personal reasons, you know, and associations that may influence one's judgment. I don't think I have a favorite. In some ways I like 'A Country Doctor' best, and yet I believe 'A Marsh Island' is a better story."

Her latest work, "A Tory Lover," was concluded in The Atlantic Monthly last August, two months after Bowdoin College had bestowed upon her the degree of Doctor of Letters.

"I have only written," she said to a literary brother a few years ago, "about what I knew and felt. In giving any idea of the influences which have shaped my literary life, I must go back to the surroundings of my childhood, and to those friends who first taught me to observe and to know the deep pleasures of simple things, and to be interested in simple and humble lives. I was born in an old colonial house in South Berwick, which was built about 1750. My grandfather had been a sea-captain but retired early and engaged more or less in the flourishing shipping trade of that time. This business in all its branches, was still in existence in my early childhood, and so I came into contact not only with the farming and up country people, but with sailors and shipmasters and lumbermen as well. I used to linger about the country stores and listen to the shrewd and often witty country talk, and I delighted in hearing of the ships which came to port, and in seeing the sea-tanned captains, who sometimes dined with my grandfather and talked of their voyages and bargains at the Barbadoes and Havana. And so I came to know directly a good deal about a fashion of life which is now almost entirely a thing of the past in New England."

"Art, you know," she said to the same man, as they sat discussing her Yankee and Irish-American sketches, "always begins with a recognition of the grotesque and unusual in life -- the mere superficial aspects of character and habit. All literature in the beginning is in relation to the lower forms of pictorial art -- it views life from the pictorial side almost exclusively. As art goes higher it recognizes facts, and then the pathetic in the ludicrous. The distinction of modern literature is the evocation of sympathy. . . . Plato said: 'The best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with each other'; and that is what I conceive to be the business of a story writer."

Miss Jewett is rather tall and perfectly dignified, but her dignity is warmed by her uncommon graciousness and by the charming brightness of her face. As her father had, surely she also has this true French gaieté de cœur. It should by this time be hardly necessary to say that flashes of wit and wisdom characterize her conversation, and that, in short, she is one of the rarest ornaments of the most cultured circle of Boston society.

From Ernest A. Baker, M.A. (Lond.), A DESCRIPTIVE GUIDE TO THE BEST FICTION, BRITISH AND AMERICAN
Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Lim., London
The MacMillian Co., New York (1903).

Deephaven. 1877. The old-world inhabitants of a decayed seaport in New England, viewed by a pair of girls making holiday there, who laugh at the quaint old people. [$1.25, 50?. Houghton,Boston. Illustrated: $2.50 Houghton, Boston (7/6 Harper, London), 1893.]

Fragments of reminiscences, glimpses of New England life and human nature, full of rest and of the placid charm of home and homely affection. [$1.25 Houghton, Boston.]

Character sketches and studies, some arranged around little incidents, some merely bits of still life. A Landless Farmer is a lowly New England King Lear; An Only Son, a piece of restrained emotion; The New Parishioner, similar in quiet interest. [$1.25 Houghton, Boston.]

Simple stories of quiet and beautiful life in rural New England, portraits of old acquaintances, and interpretations of the kindly side of the Puritan character. [Each $1.25 Houghton, Boston.]

The Town Poor, The Luck of the ?ogans, A Winter Courtship, By the Morning Boat, etc. Similar portraiture of New England folk, native types and new-comers like the Irish; all pervaded with a gentle and charitable humour. [$1.25 Houghton, Boston; 5/- Harper, London.]

Pregnant situations, evoking characteristics of temperament, rather than stories; e.g., The Native relates the visit of a successful man, half shamefaced, half in self-display, to his native village; Decoration Day, a study of patriotic emotion; The Passing of Sister Barsett, a typical piece of New England life; and two sketches of Irish New Englanders, in which the broad speech accentuates the humour. [$1.25 Houghton, Boston.]

More studies -- made in a summer holiday at a seaside village in Maine -- of homely and old- fashioned characters, venerable old people who have kept the freshness and innocence of youth; shy, unsophisticated men; women immersed in household cares; quaint originals, full of old-world graces, like the weather-beaten captain with his story of a spirit-city within the Arctic Circle, the old gatherer of simples, and other childlike Wordsworthian figures. [$1.25 Houghton, Boston; 5/- Unwin.]

Title-story describes a visit to an old woman in Maine, whose life has points of coincidence with Queen Victoria's. All the tales show the same reverent delight in quaint and gentle types of humanity. The sayings of the Irish women are humorous, and the dialect is particularly racy. [$1.25 Houghton, Boston; 5/- Smith & Elder.]

A love tale of the time of the War of Independence, introducing the vigorous personality of the redoubtable Paul Jones. [6/- Smith & Elder.]

From Josephine Daskam Bacon, "Is American Literature Bourgeois?" The North American Review 179:572 (July 1904), p. 110.

To what does Mrs. Atherton attribute the immense vogue of Mary Wilkins? Not to the information she gave us of the New England character. She did not discover this field. To say nothing of Mrs. Stowe in her generation, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett before Miss Wilkins, and Miss Alice Brown after her, have given us a saner, better balanced, more sympathetic treatment of New England life and spirit; in many cases, too, through the medium of a richer, more cultivated style, a maturer diction, than the author of A New England Nun.

From Richard Burton, Literary Leaders of America. Lothrop Publishing Company, Boston (1904), p. 314.

In the United States since 1860, there has been a remarkable growth and perfecting of the novel of real life -- realistic fiction, in the critical phrase. In the middle century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, besides writing in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" an epoch-making book, vital in power, whatever its defects and prejudices, initiated in her other stories a faithful first-hand study of homely New England character, which has been fruitfully developed by an able band of later-day followers with Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett at their head. The names throng here and cannot be enumerated. Two leaders, however, must have special mention: Howells and James, for they, more than any others, started the present-day school.

From Brander Matthews, "Literature in the New Century." The North American Review 179:575 (October 1904), p. 523.

The segregation of nationality has been accompanied by an increasing interest in the several states out of which the nation has made itself, and sometimes even by an effort to raise the dialects of these provinces up to the literary standard of the national language. In this there is no disloyalty to the national ideal, -- rather it is to be taken as a tribute to the nation, since it seeks to call attention again to the several strands twined in the single bond. In literature this tendency is reflected in a wider liking for local color and in an intense relish for the flavor of the soil. We find Verga painting the violent passions of the Sicilians, and Reuter depicting the calmer joys of the Platt-Deutsch. We see Maupassant etching the canny and cautious Normans, while Daudet brushed in broadly the expansive exuberance of the Provençals. We delight alike in the Wessex-folk of Mr. Hardy and in the humerous Scots of Mr. Barrie. We extend an equal welcome to the patient figures of New England spinsterhood as drawn by Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins, and to the virile Westerners set boldly on their feet by Mr. Wister and Mr. Garland.

from Charles F. Richardson, American Literature 1607-1885
New York: Putnam, 1904.

391-2
The lesser novelists of America, in the second literary period, found their themes in American characters, scenes, and historic episodes; in imaginary adventures of foreign travel; in ancient history, and in sentiment or politics. One Northerner endeavored to crystallize the spirit of New England thought and life in a romance at once idyllic and religious; and one Southerner painted for the nineteenth century certain phases of the picturesque life of the old régime in eighteenth-century Virginia. From out this period of activity in lesser fiction there also stands forth, in vivid isolation that may diminish but cannot wholly disappear, the potent name of that individual and characteristic story which was one of the causes of Northern triumph in the war that freed the slave. On the whole, however, the period was characterized by the decline of the Indian romantic novel; the rise and collapse of the sweeter or more superficial sentimentalism in prose; and the comparative failure of the attempt to delineate American home life in various sections; for it cannot be claimed that the writers before the war produced much that equalled the folk-pictures or character sketches given later by Miss Jewett, Miss Phelps, Miss Woolson, Eggleston, Bret Harte, "Charles Egbert Craddock," or Cable.

416-18
New England itself, already old, sometimes conventional, and not previously destitute of authors of ability, has been newly painted by several of these later writers. Sarah O. Jewett portrays the ancient, decadent, respectable, gentle, and winsome seaboard town, and tells of the life therein. The courtly old lady in black lace cap and mitts, living in a great square house with a hall running from door to door, and rich in mahogany and cool quiet; the New England girl of the better class, well educated, of good descent, and sufficiently aware of the proprieties of life, yet fresh, happy, and fond of a "good time" -- these two figures are alone worth more, as contributions to fiction, than any artificial portrayals of the "sparkling," sensational, or satirical talking-machines which are sometimes supposed to represent American life. In the New England which Miss Jewett so pleasantly and faithfully portrays, are self-respecting people, aristocratic in the only true sense; bringing up their daughters in freedom, and yet in homes, modestly but not conventually; speaking the good English which their ancestors brought from old England two centuries ago; and making, as well as finding," life worth living."
Naturalism, by which term Miss Jewett's general method may be fitly described, also characterizes the literary work of other New England women. Thus, for instance, let him who would know the real Yankee -- Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde -- read such grimly humorous stories as "Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence," "Miss Lucinda," or "The Deacon's Week," by Rose Terry Cooke. The longer and shorter stories of Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps are more intense than those of Miss Jewett; but they are also local in scene and color, and, like Mrs. Cooke's, are pervaded with a moral idea. Miss Phelps deals with stormier moods and with profounder aspirations, but the New England books of the three writers differ in selected type and intensity of tone rather than in kind. If it be said that Miss Phelps' glimpses of the unseen in "The Gates Ajar" and "Beyond the Gates" open a heaven that is little more than a reconstructed New England, and fail to portray adequately the tender human hopes and deep and true beliefs which lay in the author's mind, let it not be forgotten that hope and faith and sympathy, on the human side, find a fit expression in such stories of hers as "The Tenth of January," in which the tragedy of life and the tragedy of art combine, before the background of a New England factory town.

The most successful pictures of American characters and characteristic scenes, whether chosen from the east or the west, from city or from country, have unquestionably been presented in such short stories as those of Miss Jewett, Mrs. Cooke, Miss Phelps, or Mr. Deming rather than in long novels. Bret Harte is distinctly at his best in his brief stories and sketches, and at his worst in his larger books; Mr. Cable's "The Grandissimes" and "Doctor Sevier" are, at best, no more than equal to the separated studies of "Old Creole Days"; while Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock"), an apparent exception, writes novelettes, or long-short stories, rather than novels. Others of the newer and younger Southern writers are sketchers, not romancers; and as we look at the whole field of the new American fiction we note excellence in the small, rather than any largeness of creative ability. But a short story, like a short poem, is as legitimate as a long one; and if our large and fine new creations in fiction are few indeed, at least we escape thereby the weariness of prolixity. The explanation is not far to seek: our broad and varied national life, from the Maine ship-builders to the Louisiana Creoles, from Miss Woolson's lake country to Miss Murfree's Tennessee mountains or Bret Harte's mines and gulches, affords as yet so abundant material for description that the literary painters naturally multiply portraits, and little groups of figures, and genre pictures, rather than inclusive or ideal scenes. One such sketch as "Peter the Parson," in Miss Woolson's "Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches," is so true and therefore so valuable that I care not if the author's ambitious books, "Anne" and "East Angels," despite manifest touches of a strong hand, seem altogether unimportant in comparison. In "Peter the Parson" we have the cold, raw, scantling-and-boards life of a hateful little Philistine settlement in Michigan; but we have also high if mistaken religious devotion, the half-hopes and crushed possibilities of a real love, and a supreme self-sacrifice like that which lies at the very heart of Christianity -- and that is enough.

Barrett Wendell and Chester Noyes Greenough, A History of Literature in America, New York: Scribner's, 1904

pp. 189-194

BOOK V

THE RENAISSANCE OF NEW ENGLAND

SOME GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW ENGLAND

REFERENCES

Early New England Life: On the history of New England, see the references at the head of Chapter iii of Book I and Chapter iii of Book II; many of these references concern New England life and manners. See also, on colonial and provincial life, J. R. Lowell, "New England Two Centuries Ago" (Wks., Riverside Edition, I); W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1890; H. C. Lodge, A Short History of the English Colonies in America, New York: Harper, 1881, especially Chapter xxii; and the various books by Mrs. Alice Morse Earle.

Later New England Life: H. B. Stowe, Oldtown Folks, Boston, 1869; Whittier, Snow-Bound; Lowell, "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" (Wks., Riverside Edition, I, 43-99); E. E. Hale, A New England Boyhood (Wks., Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1898-1901, VI, 1-208); and the various writings of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins.

From the time, shortly after 1720, when Franklin left Boston, where Increase and Cotton Mather were still preaching, we have paid little attention to that part of the country. For during the seventy-two years which intervened between Cotton Mather's death and the nineteenth century, Boston was of less literary importance than it was before or than it has been since. To understand its revival, we must call to mind a little more particularly some general characteristics of New England.

Boston, whose geographical position has made it the principal city of that region, may be distinguished from most American cities by the fact that, comparatively speaking, it is not on the way anywhere. The main lines of travel from abroad to-day come to the port of New York. People bound thence for Washington proceed through Philadelphia and Baltimore; people bound westward are pretty sure to trend toward Chicago; people going southwest pass through St. Louis or New Orleans; people going around the world generally sail from San Francisco; but the only people who are apt to make the excursion from New York to Boston are those who do so for that purpose. Of course, the ease of intercommunication nowadays combines with several other causes to disguise this isolation of the capital city of New England. All the same, isolation really characterizes not only the city, but the whole region of which it is the natural centre.

This physical isolation was somewhat less pronounced when the English-speaking settlements in America were confined to the fringe of colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Even then, however, a man proceeding by land from Boston to Philadelphia had to pass through New York; and so one proceeding from New York to Virginia or the Carolinas had to pass through Philadelphia; but the only people who needed to visit Boston were people bound thither. It had happened, meanwhile, that the regions of Eastern Massachusetts, although not literally the first American colonies to be settled, were probably the first to be politically and socially developed. Sewall's diary, for example, an artless record of busy life in and about Boston from 1674 to 1729, has few more remarkable traits than the fact that the surroundings and in many respects the society which it represents are hardly yet unfamiliar to people born and bred in Eastern New England.

In the first place, the whole country from the Piscataqua to Cape Cod, and westward to the Connecticut River, was almost as settled as it is to-day. Many towns of Sewall's time, to be sure, have been divided into smaller ones; but the name and the local organization of almost every town of his time still persist; in two hundred years the municipal outlines of Massachusetts have undergone hardly more change than any equal space of England or of France. In Sewall's time, again, the population of this region, though somewhat different from that which at present exists, was much like that which was lately familiar to anybody who can remember the New England country in 1860. It was homogeneous, and so generally native that any inhabitants but born Yankees attracted attention; and the separate towns were so distinct that any one who knew much of the country could probably infer from a man's name just where he came from. So isolated a region, with so indigenous a population, naturally developed a pretty rigid social system.

Tradition has long supposed this system to have been extremely democratic, as in some superficial aspect it was. The popular forms of local government which were early established, the general maintenance of schools in every town at public expense, and the fact that almost any respectable trade was held a proper occupation for anybody, have gone far to disguise the truth that from the very settlement of New England certain people there have enjoyed an often recognized position of social superiority. This Yankee aristocracy, to be sure, has never been strictly hereditary; with almost every generation old names have socially vanished and new ones appeared. Until well into the nineteenth century, however, two facts about New England society can hardly be questioned: at any given time there was a tacitly recognized upper class, sometimes described by the word "quality"; and although in the course of time most families had their ups and downs, such changes were never so swift or so radical as materially to alter the general social structure.

In the beginning, as Cotton Mather's old word, "theocracy" asserted, the socially and politically dominant class was the clergy. Until 1885, indeed, a relic of this fact survived in the Quinquennial Catalogues of Harvard College, where the names of all graduates who became ministers were still distinguished by italics. In the same catalogues, the names of graduates who became governors or judges, or in certain other offices attained public distinction, were printed in capital letters. These now trivial details indicate how the old social hierarchy of New England was based on education, public service, and the generally acknowledged importance of the ministry. When the mercantile class of the eighteenth century grew rich, it enjoyed in Boston a similar distinction, maintained by pretty careful observance of the social traditions which by that time had become immemorial. And as the growing complexity of society in country towns developed the learned professions of law and medicine, the squire and the doctor were almost everywhere recognized as persons of consideration. From the beginning, meanwhile, there had been in New England two other kinds of people, tacitly felt to be of lower rank: those plain folks such as were originally known by the epithet "goodman," who, maintaining personal respectability, never rose to intellectual or political eminence, and never made more than enough money to keep decently out of debt, and those descendants of immigrant servants and the like, whose general character resembled that of the poor whites of the South. Just as the local aristocracy of fifty years ago provided almost every Yankee village with its principal people, so this lowest class contributed to almost every village a recognized group of village drunkards.

The political forms which governed this isolated population were outwardly democratic; the most characteristic were the town-meetings of which so much has been written. The population itself, too, was nowhere so large as to allow any resident of a given town to be a complete stranger to any other; but as the generations passed, the force of local tradition slowly, insensibly increased until, long before 1800, the structure of New England society had become extremely rigid. Sewall, as we have seen, preserves an unconscious picture of this society in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. In more deliberate literature there are various more conscious pictures of it later. To mention only a few, Mrs. Stowe's Oldtown Folks gives an admirably vivid account of the Norfolk country about 1800; Whittier's Snow-Bound preserves in "Flemish Pictures" the Essex County farmers of a few years later; and Lowell's papers on "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago" and on "A Great Public Character" -- Josiah Quincy -- give more stately pictures of Middlesex County at about the same time. The incidental glimpses of life in Jacob Abbott's "Rollo Books" are artlessly true of Yankee life in the '40s; Miss Lucy Larcom's New England Girlhood and Dr. Edward Everett Hale's more cursory New England Boyhood carry the story from a little earlier to a little later. Miss Alcott's Little Women does for the '60s what "Rollo" does for the '40s. And the admirable tales of Miss Mary Wilkins and of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett portray the later New England country in its decline. In all these works, and in the many others of which we may take them as typical, you will find people of quality familiarly mingling with others, but tacitly recognized as socially superior, almost like an hereditary aristocracy.

pp. 390-393

It may appear that we have dwelt too long on Harvard; but Harvard remains the chief intellectual centre of that part of New England from which the literature of our Renaissance sprang. It was at Harvard, on the whole, that the elder school of New England letters was nurtured. Harvard men edited the old North American Review. Through Fields's time the influence of Harvard traditions was paramount in the Atlantic Monthly. Emerson was a Harvard man; Longfellow and Lowell were Harvard professors. And so on. The contrast between the elder Harvard and the new becomes apparent. Since the days of the Renaissance, which we considered by themselves, Harvard, for all its incessant activities, has been of no great literary importance. It has tended to an intellectual isolation from which the separate men who have addressed the public have addressed them each separately and in his own way; and among all these men on whom we have touched, only one has attempted a contribution to pure literature. This is Professor Santayana, in his two or three volumes of poetry.

Throughout the period which we now have in mind, the production of poetry in New England has been copious. A good deal of this verse has been of more than respectable quality; but so little of it has emerged into distinct excellence that, if anyone were asked to name the poets of New England in recent times he might find himself at fault. He might perhaps recall the pleasant memory of Celia Thaxter (1836-1894), who passed most of her busy, brave, useful life at the Isle[s] of Shoals, where she was born and died, and whose verses, together with one or two volumes of prose, delightfully record the temper with which such humanity as hers could surpass what to most human beings would have been the benumbing limits of isolation. He might recall, too, as of New England origin, the less distinct figure of Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887), whose few, but admirable, poems bespeak the isolation of a Transcendentalist born too late. He would probably recall the hauntingly mournful isolation phrased in the still more solitary poems of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), whose mood laments a vanished past almost as palpably as the mood of Transcendentalism welcomed an unfathomed future. But almost the only figure which would define itself with certainty would be that of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-).

Aldrich, like Fields before him, passed most of his youth in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Then, for a while, he was engaged first in business, and later in journalism at New York. He did not settle in Boston until he was nearly thirty years old; but as he has lived there ever since, he has long been recognized as the chief surviving man of letters there resident. The circumstances of his earlier years, however, have naturally precluded him from immediate inheritance of local traditions. And his exquisitely finished verse -- never copious, but never free from a loving care for every detail which makes it seem better each time you read it -- accordingly appears almost as independent of local influences as was the verse of Poe in the New York of the '40s.

With Aldrich's prose work the case has been different. His Story of a Bad Boy (1870) records boy life in the dying New Hampshire seaport as vividly as Lucy Larcom's New England Girlhood (1889) records her memories of Massachusetts in the '30s. And although Aldrich's other stories, and the like, have less New England flavor, there is not a little of it in many of them; nor is there any of them which we cannot turn to with certainty of such satisfaction as should come from works of conscientious art. None the less, the fact that Howells, an Ohio man, was succeeded in control of the Atlantic Monthly by Aldrich, whose early years were passed in New Hampshire, New Orleans, and New York, is a fact which both typifies and explains the manner in which the older literary traditions of New England have been disintegrating.

Of the writers of fiction who have flourished there meanwhile, the most popular have been women. The Little Women (1867) of Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is a story of New England girlhood as vivid and as true as were Jacob Abbott's "Rollo" tales of New England childhood a generation before. The earlier stories of Miss Mary Wilkins (1862-) portray with touching pathos and humor the decline of the New England country, as the period with which we are now concerned came upon it. And the stories of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-) are equally true to the pathos of this declining New England, and at the same time almost as exquisite in finish as are the stories in general of Aldrich. Meanwhile, Mrs. Margaret Deland (1857-), a Pennsylvanian, whose married life has been passed in Boston, has written, after one or two volumes of delicate poetry, a number of stories which deal, uncompromisingly yet tenderly, with various religious and social questions such as the conditions of modern life are bound everywhere to raise.

From Horace Spencer Fiske, Provincial Types in American Fiction. New York: Chautauqua, 1907.

pp. 7-9

A kindlier, sweeter phase of New England life is seen in the satisfying art of the books written by Sarah Orne Jewett, who, for subtle sympathy with her characters, an appreciation of their finer, higher qualities, and a medium of expression Greek-like in its simplicity and serenity, must take a very high place in the portrayal of provincial New England types. In "Country By-Ways," "Tales of New England," and "A Country Doctor," and especially in "A Marsh Island" and "Deephaven," Miss Jewett has done very much to preserve in permanent literary form the quaint and beautiful traits of rural New England. As one recalls the people in "A Marsh Island," the exquisite and lovable figure of Doris Owen emerges in the dawn-light of that memorable morning when she made her trembling and heroic way to Westmarket to confess her love and dissuade her angry lover from embarking for the Banks. And there is Doris's dear old father with the touch of sentiment and imagination and love of nature, and the tireless and ambitious mother, and Jim Fales, and the jealous but virile and constant Dan Lester, -- a group of rural figures made all the more interesting by the unique background of quiet beauty and color that Miss Jewett knows how to draw so easily and so effectively.

In Miss Jewett's "Deephaven" we have a collection of short sketches and stories that show her art at its highest, and so realistic as to lead many readers to suppose that "Deephaven" is a veritable New England seaport known to themselves. Miss Jewett, however, in her preface, disclaims any close identity in her characterizations, and denies that "Deephaven" is on the actual map of New England. The two Boston girls who spent that memorable summer in the quaint old Brandon house at Deephaven make delightfully fresh and interesting figures amid the decayed aristocracy and retired sea-captains and talkative widows and sedate spinsters of the inactive but charming old seaport. The optimistic and humorous Mrs. Kew, wife of the lighthouse keeper, the reminiscent "Widow Jim," who could make rugs and preside at funerals, and had "faculty"; the pipe-smoking, story-telling old sea-captains, like Captain Isaac Horn; Captain Lant, who though now devoted to farming, had to take "a day's fishing every hand's turn, to keep the old hulk clear of barnacles;" the lame, red-shirted "Danny," with his cat and hospital stories; and the visionary Captain Sands, who had a sort of marine museum and was a specialist in weather and the mysteries of telepathy, -- some of these types seem done from the life, and over them all is a misty light of remoteness and tradition that softens and endears.

pp. 64-74

CHAPTER IV

"DEEPHAVEN" BY SARAH ORNE JEWETT

JUST before his death James Russell Lowell wrote to Miss Jewett's publishers in London: "I am very glad to hear that Miss Jewett's delightful stories are to be reprinted in England. Nothing more pleasingly characteristic of rural life in New England has been written, and they have long been valued by the judicious here." And the world of "judicious" American readers still agrees with this discriminating judgment. The daughter of "A Country Doctor," Miss Jewett had all the advantages, as a girl, of going about the country with her father on his visits to inland farms or along the seacoast; and "when the time came that my own world of imagination was more real to me than any other, I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to certain points of interest in the characters or surroundings of our acquaintances. I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself, in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said, and the sights he made me see."

Such peculiar preparation for portraying in permanent literary form the characteristics of certain provincial types in New England life bore fruit in "Deephaven," her first literary and artistic success. The fact, too, that her early life was spent in the old Maine settlement of Berwick, with its once flourishing shipping trade, its sailors and "sea-tanned captains," and that her own grandfather had been a sea-captain, gave to the writing of such a collection of sketches as "Deephaven" an authoritative and natural touch that constitutes much of their charm and value. To all these favorable conditions must be added the possession by Miss Jewett of a literary art that is almost classic in its clearness and grace, its vital sympathy, and its unaffected sincerity. If, as she herself says, "the distinction of modern literature is the evocation of sympathy," and if, as Plato said, the best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with one another, Miss Jewett's literary purpose has been very happily accomplished.

The summer that Kate Lancaster spent at the old Brandon house in Deephaven, in company with her friend who recounts the narrative, was indeed a summer of unique charm and delight -- for Deephaven was a quaint old place with high rocks and woods and hills, and Brandon house is suggestive of that fine old home in Berwick, Maine built in 1750, where Miss Jewett herself was born. Twelve miles from Deephaven the two girls left the railway and took passage in a stage-coach, with only one passenger besides themselves, who was a very large, thin, weather-beaten woman that looked tired, lonesome, and good-natured. She was delighted to respond to the remark that it was very dusty, with another remark to the effect that she should think everybody was sweeping, and that she always felt, after being in the cars awhile, as if she "had been taken all to pieces and left in the different places." This genial and talkative fellow-passenger, Mrs. Kew, proved to be the wife of the keeper of the Deephaven light, and she and her husband were destined to give the two young ladies some very unusual diversions during the summer.

Upon the inquiry as to whether Mrs. Kew knew the Brandon house in Deephaven, the genial soul replied that she knew it as well as the meeting-house. " 'He' wrote me some o' Mrs. Lancaster's folks were going to take the Brandon house this summer, an' so you are the ones? It's a sightly old place; I used to go and see Miss Katherine. She must have left a power of chinaware." Mrs. Kew also told how she herself would always be "a real up-country woman" if she lived there a hundred years. "The sea doesn't come natural to me, it kind of worries me, though you won't find a happier woman than I be, 'long shore."

As the stage drove up to the old Brandon "place," the young ladies noted with satisfaction the row of poplars in front of the great white house, the tall lilacs, the crowds of rose bushes still in bloom, the box borders, and the great elms at the side of the house and down the road. And the hall door stood wide open. Within, it was a home of great possibilities, -- four large rooms on the lower floor, and six above, a wide hall in each story, and a "fascinating garret" over the whole, where were many mysterious old chests and boxes, in one of which the girls found the love-letters of Kate's grandmother. The rooms all had elaborate cornices, and the lower hall was very fine, with an archway dividing it, and all kinds of panelings, and a great door at either end. But "the best chamber" rather inspired dread. It had a huge curtained bed, and the paper on the walls had been captured in a French prize some time in the last century, -- the color of it being an "unearthly pink and a forbidding maroon, with dim white spots, which gave it the appearance of having molded." The great lounge made the girls low-spirited, after hearing that Miss Brandon herself didn't like it, because she had seen so many of her relatives lie there dead. There were fantastic china ornaments from Bible subjects on the mantel, and the only picture was one of the Maid of Orleans, tied with an "unnecessarily strong rope to a very stout stake." The west parlor downstairs proved to be the girls' favorite room, with its great fireplace framed in blue and white Dutch tiles which represented graphically the careers of the good and the bad man. The last two of the series were of very high art, -- a great coffin stood in the foreground of each, and the virtuous man was being led off by "two disagreeable-looking angels," while the wicked one was hastening from an "indescribable but unpleasant assemblage of claws and horns and eyes which is rapidly advancing from the distance, open- mouthed, and bringing a chain with it."

In their visits to Mrs. Kew and the lighthouse Kate and her friend were particularly interested in a row of marks on the back of the wide "fore door," where Mrs. Kew had tried to keep account one summer of the number of people who innocently inquired about the depredations of the neighbors' chickens; and they were also specially interested in Mrs. Kew's collection of "relations" in the form of photographs, and in her critical remarks about special features in the faces. "That's my oldest brother's wife, Clorinthy Adams that was. She's well-featured, if it were not for her nose, and that looks as if it had been thrown at her, and she wasn't particular about having it on firm, in hopes of getting a better one. She sets by her looks though."

Among the first of Deephaven callers on the two girls from Boston was a prim little old woman by the name of Mrs. Patton. She wore a neat cap and "front," but no bonnet, and had over her shoulders a little three-cornered shawl. She was very short and straight and thin, and "darted like a pickerel" when she moved about. She impressed Kate's friend as an undoubtedly capable person with "faculty." When Kate remarked that she had been inquiring whether Mrs. Patton was still in Deephaven, the prim little woman excitedly exclaimed: "Land o' compassion! Where'd ye s'pose I'd be, dear? I ain't like to move away from Deephaven now, after I've held by the place so long I've got as many roots as the big ellum."

The care-taking Mrs. Patton hoped that Kate and her friend had found the house in "middling order," for "me and Mis' Dockum have done the best we knew, -- opened the windows and let in the air and tried to keep it from getting damp. I fixed all the woolens with fresh camphire and tobacco the last o' the winter; you have to be dreadful careful in one o' these old houses, less every thing gets creaking with moths in no time. . . . I set a trap there, but it was older'n the ten commandments, that trap was, and the spring's rusty. . . . I see your aunt's cat setting out on the front steps. She never was no great of a mouser, but it went to my heart to see how pleased she looks! Come right back, didn't she?" She continued in a reminiscent strain of pleased garrulity, recalling the funeral of Kate's aunt, Miss Brandon, and pronouncing this unqualified eulogy: "She was a good Christian woman, Miss Katherine was. 'The memory of the just is blessed'; that's what Mr. Lorimer said in his sermon the Sunday after she died, and there wasn't a blood relation there to hear it." So spoke in grateful stream the "Widow Jim" (to distinguish her from the widow of Jack Patton), who was a distinctly useful personage in the community of Deephaven. She made elaborate rugs and carpets, she "cleaned house" at the Carews' and Lorimers', she had no equal in sickness and could brew every old-fashioned dose and every variety of herb tea, and she often served her patient after death by being commander-in-chief at her funeral, -- even to the making out of the order of the procession, since she had all the local genealogy and relationship at her tongue's end. In fact, a mistake in precedence at a funeral was counted an awful thing in Deephaven; and the young ladies once chanced to hear some bitter remarks because the cousins of the departed wife had been placed after the husband's relatives, -- "the blood relations ridin' behind them that was only kin by marriage!"

The good opinion in which Mrs. Patton was held in the community was generously reflected by Mrs. Dockum, as the young ladies were returning from the post-office after their call on the Widow Jim. "Willin' woman," said Mrs. Dockum, "always been respected; got an uncommon facility o' speech. . . . Dreadful tough time of it with her husband, shif'less and drunk all his time," continued Mrs. Dockum, in the pleasure of painful reminiscence. "Noticed that dent in the side of her forehead, I s'pose? That's where he liked to have killed her; slung a stone bottle at her." At the exclamation of shocked interest on the part of the young ladies, Mrs. Dockum considerately went into details: "She don't like to have it inquired about; but she and I were sitting up with 'Manda Damer one night, and she gave me the particulars. . . . Had sliced cucumbers for breakfast that morning; he was very partial to them, and he wanted some vinegar. Happened to be two bottles in the cellar-way; were just alike, and one of 'em was vinegar and the other had sperrit in it at haying-time. He takes up the wrong one and pours on quick, and out come the hayseed and flies, and he give the bottle a sling and it hit her there where you see the scar; might put the end of your finger into the dent. He said he meant to break the bottle ag'in the door, but it went slantwise, sort of. . . . He died in debt; drank like a fish." And then Mrs. Dockum rounded her story with a concise eulogy of the widow: "Yes, 'twas a shame, nice woman; good consistent church member; always been respected; useful among the sick."

Among the most interesting types in Deephaven society were the ancient mariners who sunned themselves like turtles every pleasant summer morning on the wharves. They were known by etiquette as "captains," though the author is inclined to believe that some of them took their title by brevet upon arriving at the proper age. They used to sit close together because so many of them were deaf, and their reminiscences ran upon the voyage of the Sea Duck or the wanderings of the Ocean Rover. The captains used occasionally to get into violent altercations over the tonnage of some craft; they pulled away at little black pipes, consuming tobacco in fabulous quantities; and, needless to say, much of their attention was given to the weather. The appearance of an outsider was wont to cause a "disapproving silence"; but the girls were once bold enough to overhear from behind the corner of the warehouse the oldest and wisest of them all, Captain Isaac Horn, who was evidently giving one of his favorite stories, about some cloth he had once purchased in Bristol, which the shopkeeper delayed sending till just as they were ready to sail.

"I happened to take a look at that cloth," droned the captain in a loud voice, "and as quick as I got sight of it, I spoke onpleasant of that swindling English fellow, and the crew, they stood back. I was dreadful high-tempered in them days, mind ye; and I had the gig manned. We was out in the stream, just ready to sail. 'Twas no use waiting any longer for the wind to change, and we was going north-about. I went ashore, and when I walks into his shop ye never see a creatur' so wilted. Ye see the miser'ble sculpin thought I'd never stop to open the goods, an' it was a chance I did, mind ye! 'Lor,' says he, grinning and turning the color of a biled lobster, 'I s'posed ye were a standing out to sea by this time.' 'No,' says I, 'and I've got my men out here on the quay a landing that cloth o' yourn, and if you don't send just what I bought and paid for down there to go back in the gig within fifteen minutes, I'll take ye by the collar and drop ye into the dock.' I was twice the size of him, mind ye, and master strong.' Don't ye like it?' says he, edging round; I'll change it for ye, then.' Ter'ble perlite he was. 'Like it?' says I, 'it looks as if it were built of dog's hair and divil's wool, kicked together by spiders; and it's coarser than Irish frieze; three threads to an armful,' says I."

And there was Captain Lant, who knew all the local family history and how to bring the conversation around to a point where he could work in one of his pet stories, -- the one he told with special relish, and with the solemn declaration that it was true, being a strange story of telepathy, which Miss Jewett gives in the captain's quaint and vivid language and with all his love of detail. The last letter received from the old captain by the young ladies on their return to Boston was headed with the latitude and longitude of Deephaven, and was signed, "Respectfully yours with esteem, Jacob Lant (condemned as unseaworthy)."

One of the fishermen whom Kate and her friend knew least of all was an odd-looking, silent sort of man, more sun-burnt and weather-beaten than any of the others. He was locally known as "Danny," and one morning, finding him at work cleaning fish in a shed, Kate's friend ventured the judgment that she thought mackerel were the prettiest fish that swim. "So do I, miss, not to say but I've seen more fancy- looking fish down in Southern waters, bright as any flower you ever see; but a mackerel," holding up one admiringly, "why, they're so clean-built and trig-looking! Put a cod alongside, and he looks as lumbering as an old-fashioned Dutch brig aside a yacht." And tossing some fish heads to the cats that suddenly walked in as if they felt at home, he was reminded of a good cat story, which he proceeded to tell. At the conclusion of his narrative, when he expressed his preference for haddock over cod, and Kate asked whether it was cod or haddock that had a black stripe along their sides, Kate's friend cried out with superior knowledge, "Oh, those are haddock; they say that the Devil caught a haddock once, and it slipped through his fingers and got scorched; so all the haddock had the same mark afterward." Whereat Danny, smiling at her peculiar lore, remarked wisely, "Ye mustn't believe all the old stories ye hear, mind ye!" There was also the prominent but somewhat visionary Captain Sands, who had a sort of marine museum in an old warehouse and was "a great hand for keeping things." He took the young ladies out to Black Rock to fish for cunners, and on the way gave them some of his judgments on the weather, observing that his "gran'ther" used to say that "a growing moon chaws up the clouds." "Some folks lay all the weather to the moon, accordin' to where she quarters, and when she's in perigee we're going to have this kind of weather, and when she's in apogee she's got to do so and so for sartain; but gran'ther he used to laugh at all them things. . . . Well, he did use to depend on the moon some; everybody knows we aren't so likely to have foul weather in a growing moon as we be when she's waning. But some folks I could name, they can't do nothing without having the moon's opinion on it."

Deephaven had as peculiar types, also, old Mrs. Bonny and Miss Sally Chauncey -- the former, to whom the minister took the young ladies for a call, living a few miles from the town in company with a little black horse, a yellow-and-white dog, and a flock of hens; and the latter remaining alone in her ruined home and imagining in her harmless insanity that she was still part of the social aristocracy to which she formerly belonged. Mrs. Bonny's costume was somewhat masculine in its make-up, as she wore a man's coat, cut off so that it made an odd short jacket, and a pair of men's boots. She had, besides, short skirts, and two or three aprons, the inner one being a dress-apron and the outer ones being thrown aside on the entrance of the visitors. A tight cap with strings completed her costume. Behind the stove in the kitchen a sick turkey was being nursed, while the flock of hens was remorselessly hustled out with a hemlock broom, since callers were present.

In the conversation that ensued with the eccentric widow, the minister's reminder that Parson Reid preached the following Sunday in the neighboring schoolhouse recalled to Mrs. Bonny old Parson Padelford. He'd get worked up, and he'd shut up the Bible and preach the hair off your head, 'long at the end of the sermon." And she also described to them with much relish a recent revival where she found one of her uncertain neighbors praying, -- old Ben Patey, -- "he always lays out to get converted, and he kep' it up diligent till I couldn't stand it no longer; and by and by says he, 'I've been a wanderer'; and I up and says; 'Yes, you have, I'll back ye up on that, Ben ye've wandered around my wood lot and spoilt half the likely young oaks and ashes I've got, a-stealing your basket stuff.' And the folks laughed out loud, and up he got and cleared. He's an awful old thief, and he's no idea of being anything else. I wa'n't a-goin' to set there and hear him makin' b'lieve to the Lord."

Like Miss Sally Chauncey there were many in Deephaven who imagined they were still in the circle of the privileged class, and who had distinct pity for people who were obliged to live in other parts of the world. As Miss Honora Carew loftily remarked, the tone of Deephaven society had always been very high, and it was very nice that there had never been any manufacturing element introduced, -- any disagreeable foreign population. Truly a delightful old seaport is Deephaven, even if it is such only in name, -- for Sarah Orne Jewett once dropped anchor there.

Eva March Tappan, ed. Modern Stories. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907.

Introduction: TO THE CHILDREN

THERE are two secrets about stories that not every one knows. The first is that in one way or another every book worth reading is true. A really good "made-up story" is just as true as an arithmetic, only in another fashion. The incidents may be fiction, but the meaning must be truth itself. "The Great Stone Face," for instance, is a true story. Of course it is not at all probable that any boy ever gazed at the Old Man of the Mountain until he began to look like it; but it is true that a boy is almost sure to become like the persons whom he admires. That is the meaning, the real heart of the story. In "A Dog of Flanders," it is not probable that precisely the events narrated ever took place; but it is true that a dog is always grateful for kindness and is happy if he can return it. In the same way, Miss Jewett's "Farmer Finch" is true; for a brave girl like Polly would not sit idle because she could not have just the work in the world that she had expected, but would "Do ye nexte thynge," as the old motto puts it. Again, there are stories who incidents not only never occurred but could not possibly occur, such as Ruskin's "King of the Golden River" and Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom." No wicked older brothers ever turned into black stones, and no fisherman was ever swept down into a whirlpool which never existed. You have to do a little more thinking to find the meaning of these stories, but the meaning is there, and to discover it is one of the things that boys and girls can do as well as grown folk.

The second secret is that the real value of a story is the way it makes you feel. After you have read Dr. Hale's "A Man Without a Country," for instance, you are almost sure to feel that it is a glorious thing not to have to stand alone in the world, but to belong to your own country, and that you are bound to do all you can to help your fatherland in peace as well as in war. So in"Jackanapes," although the young hero is not made at once commander-in-chief of the British army and although he has no more adventures than would come in the way of almost any soldier, yet you close the book feeling that it is a splendid thing to be as brave and generous as he was. In "The Peterkins are Obliged to Move" there is good clean fun; and after you have read it, imitation fun, such as silly practical jokes and stories that are just a little coarse, seems rather stupid and vulgar. You know as well as the oldest and wisest persons on earth that the feelings which come from reading such books as these are good to have.

This preface is not exactly a preface; it is, rather, the text for a sermon. The sermon you can think out for yourselves.

We have had three great New England story-writers. Mary Wilkins Freeman has untutored genius, but never acquired craftsmanship; Sarah Orne Jewett had exquisite craftsmanship and lacked the force of genius; Alice Brown has genius and the craftsman's skill combined. She creates atmosphere; a rich, fragrant, flowering atmosphere of homely virtues, faith and loyalty. Very tenderly she touches belated or miscarried love-affairs, and especially has she a happy way of describing "the loves that doubted, the loves that dissembled." If this volume of "Country Neighbors," following closely on "Country Roads," gives us perhaps a superfluity of the same thing, it is not, after all, Miss Brown's fault that New England types are monotonous.

From Julian W. Abernethy, American Literature. New York: Merrill, 1911, pp. 453-455.

Howells generously remarks, apropos of the short story, that "the sketches and studies by the women seem faithfuller and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion to their number." The present activity of women in literature is one of the most prominent facts of the age; indeed it marks a historic epoch in the progress of civilization. In imaginative literature women in America are probably at the present time producing more work than men, and of an average quality, possibly, quite as high in the scale of literary merit. It is natural that in intellectual New England the widest development of feminine genius should have appeared. The common life and scenery of New England, the home, childhood, the joys and sorrows of simple human hearts, have been described by these women with remarkable fullness and truth, with realistic force and idealistic purpose, and with a pure regard for the relations of the virtues of literature to the virtues of everyday life. The names of Mrs. Stowe, Miss Alcott, Lucy Larcom, Mrs. Dorr, Mrs. Whitney, Celia Thaxter, and many others have long been household words.

Few descriptions of nature are more genuine and delightful than Celia Thaxter's "The Isles of Shoals." Elizabeth Stuart Phelps-Ward gives us also sympathetic studies of the sea that beats out its wild music for poets ears along the rocky "north shore." She knows, too, the people in the great factory towns, and at times her pen has been devoted philanthropically to "causes." But she knows best and describes best the heart and soul of the New England woman, in her strongest moods and aspirations, as one sees in "The Story of Avis" and other books in which the men are generally foils for the women. She is impulsive, passionate, and intense in her emotions, and her imagination is sometimes venturesome as in "The Gates Ajar," which was a shock to the orthodox, a comfort to many afflicted hearts, and a sensational literary success. Sweet, tender, and graceful are the songs of Julia C. R. Dorr in "Friar Anselmo," "Afternoon Songs," and other volumes, to which are to be added several novels and books of delightful travel sketches, such as "The Flower of England's Face." With these authors is closely associated the novelist, Sarah Orne Jewett, who with painstaking fidelity and in beautiful prose suffused with quiet humor paints the life of the good old-fashioned folk of her native section. We could not well spare such books as "Deephaven," "A Marsh Island," and "The Country of the Pointed Firs." Her books are alive with the fragrance of the woods, the murmur of pines, the lilt of the ebbing tide in the lush sea grass, and the simple occupations of homely country folk. With this author one gets very near to the simple heart of nature and of natural people. Rose Terry Cooke achieved a notable success with her short stories, presenting vividly the grimly humorous aspects of New England character, as in "Miss Lucinda" and "The Deacon's Week." A strong contrast to these bucolic writers is found in the work of Harriet Prescott Spofford, whose "Amber Gods," "Midsummer and May," and other short stories display a luxuriant and romantic imagination "fairly resplendent in color, rich in tone, and Oriental in perfume." One of the strongest writers of this group is Margaret Deland, who in "John Ward, Preacher" and "Sydney" grapples boldly with profound problems without disturbing the balance of fine literary values.

we can at least rejoice in the wide diffusion and good average quality of the writing ability. Academic treatises, especially on social questions, are showered from the press. If the master-songs are missing, tuneful voices answer one another from Appledore to the wheatlands, and on to "white Sierra's verge." With Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett exploring the nooks and corners of New England, with James Lane Allen interpreting the life of Kentucky, and Thomas Nelson Page that of Virginia, with Mary Murfree revealing the secrets of the Tennessee mountains, with Hamlin Garland doing angry honor to the western farmer's toil, with Mary Halleck Foote portraying that wild mining life whose prose epic was begun by Bret Harte in The Luck of Roaring Camp, the length and breadth of the land are finding speech. (135)

But our modern realism lends itself especially to close local portraitures, as in the New England stories most delicately done by SARAH O. JEWETT, most vigorously by MARY WILKINS FREEMAN. It is of interest to trace this New England line from HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, with her Old-Town Folks, The Minister's Wooing, and other well-remembered novels, to the dialect stories of Alice Brown, the Cape Cod studies of Joseph Lincoln, and note the narrowing and intensifying of the realistic method. The down-East novels of Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, poet wife of poet husband, strike, for all their abrupt energy of passion, the unmistakable New England seaport note. Even Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, naturally a dweller "in Titian's garden," she who flushed her Amber Gods with such ardent color, tries to fall in with the prevailing school. ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD, while she idealizes her characters, paints Fisherman Jack and the "Christman" against the Gloucester background that she knows so well. (318-319)

From William E. Cairns, A History of American Literature
New York: Oxford, 1912, 1916. P. 467.

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) began to write before 1883, though most of her work was done later. She was a descendant of old and cultured New England families, and was born at South Berwick, Maine, where her father was a doctor with a large country practice. As a member of a physician's family Miss Jewett had an exceptional opportunity to know intimately the lives of persons of all social grades. During her early womanhood the summer boarder was beginning to frequent the vicinity of South Berwick, and it was with a kindly hope of interpreting her humbler neighbors to these visitors that she began to write. Her first sketches were printed in the "Atlantic Monthly." Deephaven, her first novel, appeared in 1877, but is said to have been written earlier. After the publication of Deephaven she continued to write abundantly, producing a novel or a volume of short stories almost every year. Most of her work portrays New England life, and she is at her best in the representation of placid existence in a manner that frequently invites comparisons with Cranford. The Country of the Pointed Firs is probably her best novel.

From William P. Trent and John Erskine, Great American Writers. New York: Holt, 1912, pp. 200 – 201

In February, 1851, she [Harriet Beecher Stowe] began writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first instalment of which appeared in the National Era, June 5. In book form it was published in Boston, March 20, 1852, and its enormous and continuous sale began at once.

Mrs. Stowe's life from that time was eventful and full of accomplishment, but the significance of it had been conditioned by her previous experiences. She had inherited missionary fervor, and had seen what it is to be oppressed, and she devoted herself naturally to any cause of enfranchisement that presented itself. Of the outward details of her career it need only be recorded that she was twice abroad; and on her first trip just after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was welcomed with remarkable honor in England and Scotland. In 1852 her husband became professor in the Andover Theological Seminary, and in 1863 the family removed from Andover to Hartford, which was their final home. After the war Mrs. Stowe bought a place at Mandarin, Florida, and interested herself practically in the South. Her chief publications, after Uncle Tom's Cabin, were Dred, 1856, The Minister's Wooing, 1858, The Pearl of Orr's Island, 1862, Agnes of Sorrento, 1863, Old Town Folks, 1869, Old Town Fireside Stories, 1871, My Wife and I, 1872, We and Our Neighbors, 1875, Poganuc People, 1878. Mrs. Stowe died at Hartford, July 1, 1896, and was buried at Andover beside her husband, who had died ten years before.

Her novels are of two quite different kinds. Her reputation was made by a novel with a purpose, and she followed her theme in a second story; her early writing, however, and most of her later books dealt with the New England of her girlhood. If this second kind of story is less thought of now when her name is mentioned, at least the literary historian knows that in this field she was a pioneer. It is her picture of New England, rather than Hawthorne's, which has been imitated; it is with her that the work of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett or Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman is associated. She therefore has a double place in American literature, with a masterpiece in one field and pioneer triumphs in another.

1914

From Edward Garnett, "Some Remarks on American and English Fiction."
Atlantic Monthly 114 (December 1914) 748-9.

Let us look back along the line some twenty years. From an undated cutting from the London Speaker, which must belong to 1894, or 1895 at latest, I find that I singled out Mr. Hamlin Garland, Miss Murfree, Miss Grace King, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, Miss Mary Wilkins, and Miss Katharine Smith as the most gifted literary artists in the younger rising school, Messrs. W. D. Howells's, Henry James's, and George W. Cable's reputations having been of course long solidly established.

By some accident I did not come across Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's incomparable short stories till several years later, when I recommended an English publisher to import an edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs. But the failure of American criticism to recognize that, by virtue of thirty little masterpieces in the short story, Miss Jewett ranks with the leading European masters, and its grudging, inadequate recognition of the most original genius it has produced in story-telling, Mr. Stephen Crane, showed me that it had not realized that real talent, aesthetic or literary, is individual in its structure, experience, outlook, and growth, and that it makes its appeal and survives to posterity by reason of its peculiar originality of tone and vision expressed in beauty and force of form, of atmosphere, and of style.

Every fresh native talent emerges by virtue of its revelation of fresh aspects and original points of view, which create fresh valuations in our comprehension of life and human nature. Now this very simple test, which is indeed self-evident, is the touchstone by which we separate the genuine metal of imaginative art from the sham or common alloy of the popular fabricated article. If we apply it in the cases of Frank R. Stockton and Joel Chandler Harris we perceive that the originality of those delightful humorists entitles them to seats not far removed from that of Mark Twain. Again, when Mr. Frank Norris appeared, his McTeague was no literary echo, or iteration or affirmation of current social ideas or ideals, whatever may have been the precise measure of his literary talent. The same may be said of Mr. Harold Frederick's powerful novel Illumination. Later, when Mr. Dreiser came in sight with his Sister Carrie, the present writer had the honor of recommending it for English publication, while that admirable piece of realism was being cold-shouldered and boycotted for years by the body of American publishers.

I do not know whether the late O. Henry' s marvelous powers of language, gayety, creative fecundity, and imaginative power in handling a situation have yet received their due in America, but the point I wish to make clear is that between the writers above enumerated, namely between Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Miss Murfree, Miss Mary Wilkins, Miss Grace King, Mrs. Wharton, Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Mr. Frank R. Stockton, Mr. J. C. Harris, Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Stephen Crane, Mr. Frank Norris, O. Henry,¹ and such clever popular favorites as Mr. Winston Churchill, Miss Mary Johnston, Mr. Robert W. Chambers, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, Mr. John Fox, Jr., Mr. Owen Johnson, it would be waste of time to institute comparisons in respect of artistic gifts and originality of temperament. The work of the first class of writers, unequal as are their achievement in point of individual genius, is of a grade artistically far beyond the reach of the second class enumerated.

In saying that the work of the latter – represented by the six authors I have cited – is obviously deficient in 'temperamental value,' I do not mean that these authors are indistinguishable one from another, but that in tone, in insight, in style, each is little more than a popular sounding-board for the reverberation of current tones and moods of the mass of minds. Take Mr. R. H. Davis's story, The Man who could not Lose, Mr. R. W. Chambers's The Business of Life, Mr. Owen Johnson's The Salamander, and ask what measure of creative originality informs them. None. None at all, or next to none. These stories no doubt may amuse or interest or instruct their audience, but the first is worthless, the second mediocre, the third meretricious as an artistic achievement. They are destined for the rubbish heap, if indeed they have not been deposited there already. And the works, all told, of Mr. Winston Churchill, Miss Mary Johnston, and Mr. John Fox, Jr., despite the amazing energy and industry of their authors, kick the beam when weighed against a single little masterpiece by Miss Sarah Orne Jewett or Stephen Crane. This of course is an obvious truth to any critical intelligence, but I do not know how far it is now accepted in America.

¹ I omit Miss Katharine Smith and Mr. Dreiser, for I am not aware whether their later work fulfilled the promise respectively of The Cy-Barker Ledge and Sister Carrie. – The Author.

Katherine H. Schute, "The Story of a Writer" in Play Day Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914, iii-xxvi

THE STORY OF A STORY WRITER
HOW OLD ARE YOU?

DID it ever occur to you boys and girls to say to a story, "How old are you?" It is a sensible question to ask, for stories have lives like people. Like people, they are born, and live, and die. In the case of stories, it is always a perfectly polite question, too.

Some stories live to be very old. Some of them, indeed, have lived so long already that it seems as if they might last as long as the world itself. Many of the stories that you children love best are hundreds, and even thousands, of years old. Such are the Bible stories of the child Samuel in the Temple, and the shepherd boy David who slew the great giant Goliath. Such are the lovely old fairy tales of Cinderella, and of Beauty and the Beast. Such is the myth of poor, foolish King Midas with his fatal touch of gold, and of old Baucis and Philemon who -- in their poverty -- entertained great gods, unawares. How I wish we could know who first told some of these old tales! How I wish we could see the boys and girls, the men and women, who listened to them in those far-away days!

Many stories have very short lives. Five years, perhaps, after they are first told or written, no one remembers them. Why is it that some stories live to be old, while others die? I think it must be because people love them, and listen to them over and over again. What do you think?

The stories which are gathered together for you in this little book were written for the boys and girls of nearly forty years ago. Ever since, boys and girls have been hearing, and reading, and enjoying them. You will not be surprised at that when you become acquainted with Prissy and Sam, Nelly and Joe, and the other girls and boys whom you will meet in these pages. They are such pleasant companions that they seem like one's own friends and are not soon forgotten.

A YOUNG WRITER OF STORIES

We know who wrote these stories. If you will look at the beginning of this book, you will find a picture of her, and underneath the picture, her name. When you look at that kind and lovely face, you will feel sure that any stories that Miss Jewett told must be pleasant ones.

There is one thing, however, that you are not likely to know unless I tell you: Miss Jewett began to write stories when she was only a very little girl. She was fortunate in having a sister, about two years older, who used to listen to these stories. Many a day, and sometimes at night, when the two little folks had been snugly tucked up in bed, the story-teller would weave wonderful tales for her sister's pleasure and her own. Often she wrote out these stories; sometimes she wrote them in rhyme. How I wish we could see some of those early stories!

THE OLD HOME

You will want to know more about this little girl, I am sure. She was born in a beautiful old house, still standing in the village of South Berwick, Maine. At that time, the house was already about one hundred years old; it belonged to her Grandfather Jewett, and had been his home for many years before that September day in 1849, when the dark-eyed granddaughter was born into the household.

The grandfather had been a sea-captain in his youth. But while he was still a young man he left the sea and went into the West India trade; that is, he owned sailing-vessels which brought the products of the West Indies to our shores, and carried back to the islands the manufactures of our towns. This business kept alive his interest in ships, and seafaring people, and foreign lands. And so it came about that sea-tanned captains were often guests at his hospitable table. Their talk and stories gave the little girl a knowledge of the great, distant world such as few children have a chance to acquire. The old house, with its square rooms and spacious entrance hall, was full of curious and interesting things that had come from far-away seaports. What wonderful stories each might have told her if it could have spoken!

When the little girl grew to womanhood, she wrote about her interest in ships in words that you will like to read: "A little way up the shore there was formerly a shipyard, and I know of four ships that were built there much less than fifty years ago. My grandfather was part owner of them, and their names, with those of other ships, have been familiar to me from my babyhood. It is amusing that the ships of a family concerned in navigation seem to belong to it and to be part of it, as if they were children who had grown up and gone wandering about the world. Long after some familiar craft has changed owners even, its fortunes are affectionately watched."

In front of the fine old house was a square door-yard, shut off from the village by white fences and four great lilac bushes. From the gate a brick walk led to the front door, with its shining brass knocker. Behind the house, where now a wonderful flower garden blooms, were wide green yards with tall elm trees shading them. Nearer the house stood a long line of barns and sheds, one of which had a large room in its upper story where an old ship's foresail was spread over the floor. "This made a capital play-room in wet weather," Miss Jewett tells us.

Around the village were deep pine woods, and high hills from which the White Mountains could be seen. Below the village two beautiful rivers joined forces and emptied their waters into the sea, not many miles away.

THE LITTLE GIRL'S FAMILY

These were lovely surroundings for a little girl to grow up in, were they not? But better still was the family group which surrounded her in her childhood. Besides her grandfather and grandmother, she was blest with a dear father and mother, a companion and playmate in her sister Mary, and a baby sister, six years younger. Before this baby sister was born, the grandmother had died; but the grandfather lived until our little story-writer was ten years old. There were another grandfather and grandmother living in the town of Exeter, New Hampshire. This grandfather was a physician, Dr Perry; and to the same great profession belonged the little girl's father, Dr. Theodore Jewett. There were also some grand-aunts, who must have been very kind and generous and fond of young people, for their little niece remembered them with great affection as long as she lived.

I mention all these relatives in order to show you that Miss Jewett, when a child, saw a great deal of older people. She loved them dearly and felt at home with them. Read these words from a letter of Miss Jewett's, and you will see how much she cared for old people: "She is one to be most sadly missed – the last of my three dear grand-aunts, and they all died last year, and now their houses must all be shut, -- dear and beautiful and full of kindness ever since I can remember. I often say this to myself with a thankful heart. It was wonderful to have kept them all so long."

Miss Jewett's mother was a delicate, gentle woman with very lovely manners, such as her mother had before her. This is one reason, surely, why the daughter grew up to have a gentle courtesy toward every one, especially, perhaps, toward older people.

Her father, as I have already told you, was a physician, "a country doctor." Many were the hours that his daughters spent in driving about the country with him, as he went to visit his patients. Dr. Jewett generally took only one little girl at a time, often leaving the child to hold the reins as he went indoors. In this way the girls came to know and love horses and to understand how to manage them.

The doctor was a very wise and kind physician, and carried far more than medicine to his patients. "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine," says the old proverb; and sometimes the doctor's hearty, friendly laugh would ring out as he sat at the bedside of some sick patient. But often as he joined his little companion, waiting in the carriage outside, and drove away, a careworn look would come into his face, and he would shake his head and say sorrowfully, "Poor thing, poor thing!"

No wonder that his patients loved him dearly, when he carried their troubles in his heart with so much sympathy! No wonder that they had a cordial welcome for his daughters long years after his work among them was finished! "Which one of the doctor's girls be you?" some old man would say as he met one of the three ladies on the street or in the village store.

In a story of Miss Jewett's which you children would enjoy, there is a delightful country doctor, Dr. Prince, who must be very much like Miss Jewett's father. Betty Leicester is the name of the story. You can make Betty's acquaintance at the public library, any day, and you will find it well worth making. As Betty sits waiting in Dr. Prince's carriage, outside a home stricken with illness and anxiety, her thoughts, I am sure, are such as Miss Jewett herself must have had, more than once in her girlhood, as she waited for her father.

HER PLAY DAYS

You will find that most of the children in this book of stories like to play out of doors. Perhaps you will guess rightly from this that Miss Jewett, herself, was an out-of-door child. Sometimes she wandered about alone in the pastures and the woods. This is her own way of telling about it, -- "I was first cousin to a caterpillar if they called me to come in, and I was own sister to a giddy-minded bobolink when I ran away across the fields, as I used to do very often."

Sometimes, instead of running away across the fields, she went very primly to some old neighbor's house to call, like any grown-up person. Here is her own pleasant memory of such a call: "I can remember that I used to sit on a tall ottoman, with nothing to lean against, and my feet were off soundings, I was so high above the floor. We used to discuss the weather, and I said that I went to school (sometimes), or that it was then vacation, as the case might be, and we tried to make ourselves agreeable to each other. Presently my lady would take her keys out of her pocket, and sometimes a maid would come to serve me, or else she herself would bring me a silver tray with some pound cakes baked in hearts and rounds, and I proudly felt that I was a guest; though I was such a little thing an attention was being paid me, and a thrill of satisfaction used to go over me for my consequence and importance. A handful of sugar-plums would have seemed nothing beside this entertainment. I used to be careful not to crumble the cake, and I used to eat it with my gloves on, and a pleasant fragrance would cling for some time afterward to the ends of the short lisle-thread fingers. I have no doubt that my manners as I took leave were almost as distinguished as those of my hostess, though I might have been wild and shy all the rest of the week."

She and her sister Mary had the best of times together. Sometimes they played vigorous boys' games with some boy playfellows, who were near neighbors. But one of their greatest delights was to play at housekeeping out of doors, with bits of broken crockery, which served as dishes. These they arranged on little wooden shelves, which the gardener put up for them against the wall. I suspect that they had an even better time than Nelly and her friends with their fine tea-set in Marigold House. I have tried both ways of playing house, myself, and I know which is the better fun.

HER SCHOOL-DAYS

In spite of her outdoor life, Miss Jewett was not strong as a child and was, therefore, unable to go to school regularly. But while she was still a very little girl, she began to learn two of the best things that can be learned in school or out. She learned to read books and to see the world about her.

Partly because there were many books in the old house, the little girl soon became a great reader. Even in the dullest books she found something to enjoy; and in the most interesting she lost herself completely. Her father, and mother, and one of her grandmothers guided her reading, encouraging her to read aloud a great deal, in that way acquainting her with some of the best books in the world, books that were written for older people. But she was fond of children's books and girls' books, too. In one of her most delightful stories, Deephaven, she tells us the names of some of the books that she loved when she was young. Among these were Mr. Rutherford's Children, Jean Ingelow's Stories told to a Child, and Mrs. Whitney's A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. These books are still alive (you know what that means); and two of them, at least, may be found at the public library.

As she grew older she read a surprising number of books; and often in her letters to her friends she spoke of the book she was reading at the time. Many people read books without taking anything away from them; but it was never so with Miss Jewett. The places and people in books seemed real to her, and were remembered long years after she first met them. Here is a pleasant memory in a letter written when she was over fifty years old: "I felt almost as if I were seven years old again and cuddled into a corner with my beloved story of Mr. Rutherford's Children." Perhaps some book that you are reading now will be a pleasant memory for you on some far-away day. Which one do you suppose it will be? Once, in a letter from Greece, Miss Jewett wrote: "I keep thinking that I shall never be, so to speak, so handy to Constantinople again, and I should like to have the means of making the Arabian Nights come true." You see she loved the Arabian Nights, too.

Although I did not put it in that way, I have already told you how our little friend studied geography. Do you remember how it was? History she learned from books and from the talk that went on all about her. "I was always listening to stories of three wars," she once wrote. These were the siege of Louisburg, the Revolution (in which her ancestors had taken part), and the War of 1812. When she was only twelve years old, the Civil War broke out, so that she learned all that part of the history of our country, while it was in the making.

But the best part of her education lay in those long drives which father and daughter took together. Dr. Jewett taught the little girl to see the beauty of the country roads through which they drove, and -- better still -- to be interested in the people whom they visited. Not only the people, but the old country houses, with their quaint furnishings and old-fashioned gardens, grew to be her familiar friends.

In these early years, the child's mind was full of dreams and fancies of her own, visions of far-away things. If she had been left to her own thoughts, she might not have realized how much there was close by her that was full of beauty and interest. I wonder if you know that it is the same with all of us if we would only open our eyes. All about us are beautiful things to look at, -- sky, and trees, and grass, and the stones of which great buildings are made. All around us, too, are people whom we should find well worth knowing, if we would only take pains to be friendly toward them.

Like all other children the little girl did not half know how much her father was doing for her, although she dearly loved the drives in his company. But when she grew up, she knew that it was to him that she owed the best things in her life.

HER ANIMAL FRIENDS

There are many things in Miss Jewett's writings which show that she was fond of animals and observed them closely. She watched and listened to them all, from the sweetest singer among the birds to the homeliest old toad in the garden. "I became very neighborly with a sober-minded toad," she writes, "that sat still on the gravel walk, blinking and looking at me, as if he had made plans for sitting on the garden bench and I was giving him great inconvenience."

I wish there were room to add for you here all the interesting things Miss Jewett has to tell about the animals she watched. Here are a few.

TAMING ANIMALS

"It is not necessary to tame them before they can be familiar and responsive; we can meet them on their own ground, and be surprised to find how much we may have in common. Taming is only forcing them to learn some of our customs; we should be wise if we let them tame us to make use of some of theirs."

DOWN THE RIVER

"It sometimes takes me a whole afternoon to go two miles down the river. There are many reasons why I should stop every now and then under one bank or another; to look up through the trees at the sky, or at their pictures in the water; or to let the boat lie still, until one can watch the little fish come back to their playground on the yellow sand and gravel; or to see the frogs, that splashed into the water at my approach, poke their heads out a little way to croak indignantly, or raise a loud note such as Scotch bagpipers drive out of the pipes before they start a tune. The swallows dart like bats along the surface of the water after insects, and I see a drowned white butterfly float by, and reach out for it; it looks so frail and little in the river."

ANIMAL TRACKS

"I wish to tell you about a drive yesterday 'down the other side of the river'; the river frozen; the snow very white and thinly spread like nicest frosting over the fields, and the pine woods as black as they could be, -- no birds, but the tracks of every sort of little beastie. They seemed to have been all out on visits and errands and going such distances on their little paws and claws; somehow it looks too much for a mouse to go half a mile along the road or across a field. Think how a hawk would see him! I think we knew every track but one, -- it had long claws like a crow's and a tail that never lifted; we settled upon a big old rat who had come up from an old wharf by the river-side."

MOTHER ROBIN

"Oh, you should see the old robin by my bedroom window a-fetching up her young family! I long to have you here to watch the proceedings. Oh, the wide mouths of the three young ones, -- how they do reach up and gape all together when she comes near the nest with a worm! I am getting to be very intimate with the growing family. I hate every pussy when I think what a paw might do. I waited by the window an hour at tea-time, spying them."

Besides the wild creatures, there were pet animals that were very dear to her. Read what she says about a few of these: first, about Sheila, her beautiful saddle-horse.

SHEILA

"She is careful when I come home late through the shadowy, twilighted woods, and can hardly see my way; she forgets then all her little tricks and capers, and is as steady as a clock with her tramp, tramp, over the rough, dark country roads. I feel as if I had suddenly grown a pair of wings when she fairly flies over the ground, and the wind whistles in my ears."

CRABBY

I mourn for poor Crabby -- poor little dog! I hate to think we shall never see him again. I never liked him so much as I have this summer, in his amiable and patient age. However, I had worried much about what should come next when he was blinder and feebler, and it is good to think that his days are done so comfortably."

Besides Crabby, we hear of Jock, and Roger, and Browny, each of whom was good company for her, at one time or another, in her lonely pasture walks.

I am sure you will care for what she writes about the pet bird that had belonged to her father.

BOBBY

"I came home this last time to find that dear bright wise little Bobby, father's tame little bird that he was so fond of, was dead and gone. There never was a little creature with so true and good a heart. He knew so many things -- though not one trick! and he would chirp at me until I answered and spoke to him, and then would sing himself to pieces. How often I have laughed and begged him to be still; and now that live little voice is still enough and its wisp of grey feathers. John and I put him into a little box, and buried him when nobody else knew it, down under the grass on father's grave, where so much sweet cheerfulness lies still already. It was one of the dear links with those old days, you know, dear, and I can't help thinking that Bobby's spark of life is not put out altogether."

OTHER OUT-OF-DOOR FRIENDS

It was not only animals that Miss Jewett loved, but all out-of-door things. When she was a very little child, she would come triumphantly in, with the first green grass blades, a gift for her mother, tightly clasped in her warm little hand. In a letter to the poet, Whittier, who was a dear friend of hers, she once spoke of "the country out of which I grew and where every bush and tree seem like my cousins."

She speaks constantly of flowers and trees as if they were as near and dear as cousins. One day in the fall she wrote to a friend, "I see from the window that a row of zinnias are all brown, but the upper flower-bed is as bright as ever -- all the friendly marigolds -- and I shall have them tucked up with a blanket if it is cold again tonight." Here is what she has to say about others among her "cousins."

GOOD-BYE TO THE WOODS

"The woods I loved best had all been cut down the winter before. I had played under the great pines when I was a child, and I had spent many a long afternoon under them since. There never will be such trees for me any more in the world. I knew where the flowers grew under them, and where the ferns were greenest, and it was as much home to me as my own house. They grew on the side of a hill, and the sun always shone through the tops of the trees as it went down, while below it was all in shadow. . . . I loved those trees so much that I went over the hill on the frozen snow to see them one sunny winter afternoon to say good-bye, as if I were sure they could hear me, and looked back again and again, as I came away, to be sure I should remember how they looked. And it seemed as if they knew as well as I that it was the last time, and they were going to be cut down."

THE DEAREST TREE

"There is another solitary tree which is a great delight to me, and I go to pay it an afternoon visit every now and then, far away from the road across some fields and pastures. It is an ancient pitch-pine, and it grows beside a spring, and has acres of room to lord it over. It thinks everything of itself, and although it is an untidy housekeeper, and flings its dry twigs and sticky cones all around the short grass underneath, I have a great affection for it. I like pitch-pines better than any trees in the world at any rate, and this is the dearest of its race. I sit down in the shade of it and the brook makes a good deal of noise as it starts out from the spring under the bank, and there always is a wind blowing overhead among the stiff green branches."

THREE YEARS LATER

"Alas, when I went to see my beloved big pitch-pine tree that I loved best of all the wild trees that lived in Berwick, I found only the broad stump of it beside the spring, and the top boughs of it scattered far and wide. It was a real affliction, and I thought you would be sorry, too, for such a mournful friend as sat down and counted the rings to see how many years old her tree was, and saw the broad rings when good wet summers had helped it grow and narrow ones when there had been a drought, and read as much of its long biography as she could."

THE POPLAR FAMILY

"I miss very much some poplars which stood on the western shore, opposite the great house, and which were not long since cut down. They were not flourishing, but they were like a little procession of a father and mother and three or four children out for an afternoon walk, coming down through the fields to the river. As you rowed up or down they stood up in bold relief against the sky, for they were on high land. I was deeply attached to them, and in the spring when I went down river for the first time, they always were covered with the first faint green mist of their leaves, and it seemed as if they had been watching for me, and thinking that perhaps I might go by that afternoon."

Miss Jewett must have been especially fond of poplars, for in the beautiful garden behind her old home some noble poplars are standing, which she planted there with her own hands. You see she not only loved the trees which she found already growing in the world, but she helped to make the world more beautiful by planting and tending trees of her own. Just try planting a tiny tree some day, and see what pleasure it will mean for you and other people later on.

HER LOVE OF HOME

Miss Jewett traveled widely in foreign lands and cared deeply for the beauty that she saw there. This was partly because she had been able to see the beauty in her own country and in her own home. The commonplace dandelion, she tells us, was always her favorite flower. And once when she was in Athens, one of the most famous and beautiful cities in the world, she wrote about "the wintry sky, of such astonishing blue, with its blinding light, like one of our winter mornings after a snowstorm." So you see, you and I may look at the blue winter's sky any clear day after a snowstorm, and say to ourselves, "The sky looks like this in Athens."

Here are other words of hers to show that traveling abroad had made her more keenly alive to the beauty that lay all about her at home.

A JOURNEY IN THE PASTURE

"I did have the most beautiful time yesterday afternoon. I feel as if I had seen another country in Europe. Oh, a great deal better than that, though I only went wandering over a great tract of pasture-land down along the river."

A PLOUGHED FIELD

"Where the land has been plowed its color is as beautiful as any color that can be found the world over, and the long shining brown furrows grow warm lying in the sun."

A NEW ENGLAND LAKE

"The house where I stayed is so close to the lake that the little waves come clucking up to the very walls, and one lands as immediately as if it were Venice, and hears the loons calling as if it were still a wilderness."

HER WORK

You would be astonished to know what a busy woman Miss Jewett was, and how many stories she wrote. There are long ones and short ones, stories for children and stories for grown people, nearly twenty books in all. Writing stories may seem to you like an easy kind of work, especially for any one who began when she was a little girl. But Miss Jewett's stories cost many hours of patient, painstaking work. It was work that was worth doing, for the stories have given pleasure to more people than you or I could easily count.

One good thing about these stories is that they help different kinds of people to understand one another. Miss Jewett knew and loved country people and city people, rich people and poor people; and she put all kinds into her books. Then the out-of-door world that was so dear to her constantly finds a place in her stories. Surely the next best thing to being there, is to read stories that make us imagine we are out of doors.

More than this, people are made better and happier by reading such stories as she wrote; for although her stories are sometimes sad, they are more often merry; and they are always kind. She was quick to see the funny things that people say and do; but she knew how to tell them without "making fun of" the people themselves. But perhaps the best thing about the stories is that they are -- as we say – "true to life." So true are they that in years to come, people may turn to them to learn what life was really like, in the last century, in New England country places. Such stories have what we call historical value.

HER FRIENDS

But greater than Miss Jewett's love for the out-of-door world, in which she was always happy, and for her work, to which she was deeply devoted, was her love for her friends. This you may see again and again in her stories and her letters. Like all the best and wisest people, she was very grateful always for what other people had done for her, and was quick to speak her gratitude. In writing once of a lovely old-fashioned story by Mrs. Stowe, The Pearl of Orr's Island, she told gratefully how the opening chapters of the story taught her "to see with new eyes."

Once when speaking of a friend's visit she wrote, "It is a great pleasure to have had her here in the old house; such guests never really go away -- which makes an old house very different from a new one."

Among her friends, in a little seashore town which she sometimes visited, was an old fisherman. After he had grown so aged and feeble that, instead of going out in the fishing-boats, he sat at home knitting stockings, he thought, one spring day, that he saw Miss Jewett driving by. Hurriedly catching up the old spy-glass that he had used at sea, he made sure that it was she, and then toiled over to the moorings, where he had been but once before in many months, to bid her welcome.

You know when an author writes a book, he often puts at the beginning what is called a dedication; that is, a few words in which he offers the book to some dear friend or distinguished person, as if it were a gift. In her dedications, Miss Jewett shows her warm affection for her family and her many friends.

In her first book, Deephaven, she writes : --

"To my father and mother -- my two best friends -- and then to all my other friends whose names I say to myself lovingly, though I do not write them here."

Another book is dedicated "To my dear Sister Mary"; and another, --

To my dear younger sister
C. A. E.
I have had many pleasures that were doubled because you shared them, and so I write your name at the beginning of this book.

S. O. J.

This dedication will interest you, I am sure: --

This book of stories
is dedicated with grateful affection
to
John Greenleaf Whittier.

But the dedication into which she put the warmest gratitude of her whole life is placed at the beginning of Country By-Ways, published soon after her father's death. You must read these words aloud to see how beautiful they are, how like a poem.

To
T. H. J.
My dear Father; my dear Friend:
The best and wisest man I ever knew;
Who taught me many lessons and showed me many things
As we went together along the
Country By-Ways.

HER LAST YEARS

With the last years of Miss Jewett's life came illness, and suffering, and the laying aside of her work. All this she bore with great patience and sweetness. Her love of out-of-doors, of books, and of people, remained strong and tender. She was surrounded by those who loved her and delighted to serve her.

The end of the sweet, radiant life came, in early summer, in the beautiful old homestead where it had begun almost sixty years before. But such lives never really end. Although they leave the world poorer because they have passed out of it, they leave it richer because they have been in it, and grateful for all they have given it.

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, "Idealized New England," The New Republic (May 8, 1915) 20-21.

    "WHAT a terrible book," I said, "what a supremely cruel book!"
    "A tragic masterpiece," she contradicted, "a landmark in American literature. Against that iron New England background Mrs. Wharton's few figures have an almost Euripidean quality."
    "But the Greeks never made their audiences writhe," I protested. "Could you write choruses to 'Ethan Frome,' melodious choruses to be chanted by tranquil, veiled women and offering some alleviation to the bitter lot of man? No," I went on with heat, "you'll find only jibbering fiends to break Ethan's agony. The story is a fine example of what hate can accomplish as creative inspiration; and of the difference between observation and understanding."
    "Come now," she said, "that sounds like local prejudice. You should be sufficiently disaffected by New York and Europe to perceive the depleted side of you native states."
    "Have I not seen the industrious Swede and the inscrutable Finn absorbing the land cleared by my ancestors' vitality?"
    "Well then! And you care so much for the French classic manner -- how can you fail to appreciate the rapidity, the suppressions, the sharp yet delicate shadings of this poignant New England drama?"
    "Ah, but that's just why the book wounds me so. My acquired literary sense, which Mrs. Wharton pricks to admiration on every page, here conflicts with something far more real and subconscious -- the knowledge I was born with of the kind of people, the kind of place, yes and the kind of drama of weakened will she is so relentlessly describing. And I tell you that in spite of the vraisemblance of the surface, she has got them all wrong. She has nowhere dug down into the subsoil."
    "You don't mind quarreling with the authorities," she remarked. "Of course you read Mr. Herrick on Mrs. Wharton in THE NEWREPUBLIC?"
    "Yes, it was precisely the article which sent me back to the sources. No doubt Mrs. Wharton is more psychologist than social historian; no doubt, as he said, her real interest is in the subtler and more universal sort of spiritual conflicts. But I can't admit that the conflict between love and duty in 'Ethan Frome' is less conditioned by special environment, than, for example, Lily Bart's struggle."
    "You will grant that men tied to wives older than themselves, ill, ugly and querulous, are doomed in every quarter of the globe to fall in love with girls like blackberries who put red ribbons in their hair."
    "Certainly. But Ethan and his wife Zeena, and her young cousin, Mattie Silver, are not generalized types. Would Mr. Herrick accept them as they stand, for Ohio or Illinois? They are New England country people of old stock living in a lonely snowed-in hill town in the Berkshires. Mrs. Wharton's deliberate purpose is to show what life in Starkfield really means to a man who has been there too many winters; to show the grim New England skeleton that the summer resident usually fails to discover during his pleasant months in the elm-shaded village -- unless he happens upon a degenerate chore-boy, or sees a poor little girl in short skirts carrying her shame to school under a cape."
    "True, and the New England writers have largely ignored the skeleton. The 'idyll' has been done to death, like the conscience. I commend Mrs. Wharton for finding a new subject in an overworked field."
    "So do I, but if 'Ethan Frome' is a New England tale in the same sense as Miss Brown's or Mrs. Freeman's stories or 'The Country of the Pointed Firs' -- and this is just the point I am venturing to make against Mr. Herrick -- then surely one is justified in asking, as he does about the New York novels, whether the author has been fair to her subject. Do Zeena's false teeth click true, do Ethan and Mattie make love in Starkfield fashion, would they have taken the fatal coast that brought about the intolerable horror of their lives?"
    "Ugh," said my friend, "those false teeth -- what a sure realistic note! I can never forget the glass by the bed, into which the wife dropped them when she blew out the candle at night in the terrible gray, cold room."
    "Of course you can't. Neither could Mrs. Wharton. You both look at Starkfield with the eyes of the sophisticated stranger who arrives there is a blizzard, and stumbles through the drifts into Ethan's run-down 'place.' You notice the superficial things that would make you miserable. Ethan suffered in all sorts of ways, but not from false teeth: he was brought up on them! His mother had them; his cousins and neighbors had them; he probably admired Mattie less because she hadn't 'had her molars out'!"
    "Well, I waive the teeth," said she with a shudder. "Let's take the coasting parties and the church sociable. Surely Mrs. Wharton has those in key?"
    "In the unconsciously contemptuous key of the person who has a box at the opera. How should cosmopolitans understand what such diversions mean to Starkfield folks? They have all sorts of consolations if you only knew. Even when winter breaks and the teams sink up to their axles in mud, they have things to live for and look for -- pussy-willows, for instance. Laugh if you like! Do you remember 'Miss Tempy's Watchers' and the one thorny quince tree she 'kind of expected into bloomin' ' every spring?"
     "You mean that because of its very repressions, its very barrenness, and physical deprivations, New England life still produces a sort of flower -- "
    "Pale as snowdrops, hidden in dead leaves like hepaticas and arbutus; yet precious to those who know where to look for it. That is the sort of flower Ethan's and Mattie's love was, but they could never have expressed it to each other."
    "Mrs. Wharton lets them express it so little," she objected.
    "Ah, but a word, a touch would have spoiled it for them. I think Ethan, dim and weakened descendant of rugged forefathers that he was, would have had the spirit to drive his Mattie to the station when his wife sent her packing. But he would not have dreamed of stopping for that preposterous coast for death. It was just Mrs. Wharton's own sense of the blankness and emptiness, the lack of beauty and passion in Starkfield lives, that made her construct that tremendous fourth act for her lovers and condemn them to its gruesome, long-drawn epilogue."
    "You think they would have driven on silently to the station and parted with a dumb handshake and a look?"
    "Sustained by something they did not understand, something they half rebelled against and yet could not possibly foreswear."
    "Then Ethan's real tragedy would have been that he had nothing real, tangible, to cling to -- only an idea, a feeling, a dream to carry him through those slow gray years when Zeena continued to flourish on patent medicines?"
    "Exactly. The real New England tragedy, as Mrs. Wharton herself realized at bottom, is not that something happens but that nothing does. Yet if Ethan was tender to Zeena instead of strangling her complaining voice in her lanky throat, it was because when he was out alone in the pasture lot and heard the hermit thrush singing in the pines he knew he had been right. The image of his girl was warm in his heart then and undefiled, like Martha's memory of her 'lady.' "
    "Miss Jewett again! It isn't fair. She had a natural love of light and sun, an aversion to the shadow and cruelty and ugliness of life which Mrs. Wharton has the courage to face and to probe."
    "Is that the essential point of difference? I don't think so. There are chapters in Miss Jewett's works -- in 'Deephaven' for example -- and passages in her letters which show her full knowledge of the shadow even though she did not often linger there. For that matter, almost any of her stories if told from outside in rather than from inside out might be sordid and grim. That's the bearing of our whole argument, isn't it? Take the 'The Queen's Twin.' What was she? To most people a poor, cracked old creature, the victim of a silly delusion. It needed the feeling heart of Mrs. Todd to realize that she was, in fact as in fancy, the sister soul of royalty, a woman with a shining destiny."
    "You evidently think the only creative truth is that perceived by love. I believe any strong passion is worth recording."
    "Possibly. Indifference could not have written 'Ethan Frome.' But if Mrs. Wharton had realized Ethan as Miss Jewett did the Queen's Twin, as she herself loved and understood her most significant creation, Lily Bart, we should get some shock of those deep-down unwritable things which are the vital parts of novels as they are of human beings. We should get life, not a literary copy of it."
    "It's no use," said my friend, "to argue on her own soil with the descendant of a band of hopeless idealists who see the hardest facts in a sort of Platonic glow. I am afraid I must still read and admire 'Ethan Frome.' "
    "Wait till you are old. That is a New England counsel, but just wait! Then the 'Queen's Twin,' and the 'Dunnet Shepherdess' will still be full of living human poetry and truth and the salt-sweet scent of high coast pastures, and 'Ethan Frome' will be rotting in his grave."

From Henry James, "Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields." Atlantic Monthly 116 (July 1915) 21-31.

To speak in a mere parenthesis of Miss Jewett, mistress of an art of fiction all her own, even though of a minor compass, and surpassed only by Hawthorne as producer of the most finished and penetrating of the numerous 'short stories' that have the domestic life of New England for their general and their doubtless somewhat lean subject, is to do myself, I feel, the violence of suppressing a chapter of appreciation that I should long since somewhere have found space for. Her admirable gift, that artistic sensibility in her which rivaled the rare personal, that sense for the finest kind of truthful rendering, the sober and tender note, the temperately touched, whether in the ironic or the pathetic, would have deserved some more pointed commemoration than I judge her beautiful little quantum of achievement, her free and high, yet all so generously subdued character, a sort of elegance of humility or fine flame of modesty, with her remarkably distinguished outward stamp, to have called forth before the premature and overdarkened close of her young course of production. She had come to Mrs. Fields as an adoptive daughter, both a sharer and a sustainer, and nothing could more have warmed the ancient faith of their confessingly a bit disoriented countryman than the association of the elder and the younger lady in such an emphasized susceptibility. Their reach together was of the firmest and easiest, and I verily remember being struck with the stretch of wing that the spirit of Charles Street could bring off on finding them all fragrant of a recent immersion in the country life of France, where admiring friends had opened to them iridescent vistas that made it by comparison a charity they should show the least dazzle from my so much ruder display. I preserve at any rate the memory of a dazzle corresponding, or in other words of my gratitude for their ready apprehension of the greatness of big 'composed' Sussex, which we explored together almost to extravagance -- the lesson to my own sense all remaining that of how far the pure, the peculiarly pure, old Boston spirit, old even in these women of whom one was miraculously and the other familiarly young, could travel without a scrap of loss of its ancient immunity to set against its gain of vivacity.

There was vivacity of a new sort somehow in the fact that the elder of my visitors, the elder in mere calculable years, had come fairly to cultivate, as it struck me, a personal resemblance to the great George Eliot -- and this but through the quite lawful art of causing a black lace mantilla to descend from her head and happily consort with a droop of abundant hair, a formation of brow and a general fine benignity; things that at once markedly recalled the countenance of Sir Frederick Burton's admirable portrait of the author of Romola and made it a charming anomaly that such remains of beauty should match at all a plainness not to be blinked even under the play of Sir Frederick's harmonizing crayon. Other amplified aspects of the whole legend, as I have called it, I was afterwards to see presented on its native scene -- whereby it comes back to me that Sarah Jewett's brave ghost would resent my too roughly Bostonizing her: there hangs before me such a picture of her right setting, the antique dignity -- as antiquity counts thereabouts -- of a clear colonial house, in Maine, just over the New Hampshire border, and a day spent amid the very richest local revelations. These things were not so much of like as of equally flushed complexion with two or three occasions of view, at the same memorable time, of Mrs. Fields's happy alternative home on the shining Massachusetts shore, where I seem to catch in latest afternoon light the quite final form of all the pleasant evidence. To say which, however, is still considerably to foreshorten; since there supervenes for me with force as the very last word, or the one conclusive for myself at least, a haunted little feast as of ghosts, if not of skeletons, at the banquet, with the image of that immemorial and inextinguishable lady Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, the most evidential and most eminent presence of them all, as she rises in her place, under the extremity of appeal, to declaim a little quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that 'Battle-hymn of the Republic,' which she had caused to be chanted half a century before and still could accompany with a real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line,

The geniality of this performance swept into our collective breast again the whole matter of my record, which I thus commend to safe spiritual keeping.

From William Joseph Long, Outlines of English and American Literature.
New York: Ginn and Co., 1917.

p. 515
We name only, by way of indicating the wide variety that awaits the reader, the charming stories of Grace King and Kate Chopin dealing with plantation life; the New England stories, powerful or brilliant or somber, of Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke and Mary E. Wilkins; the tender and cheery southern stories of Thomas Nelson Page; the impressive stories of mountaineer life by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock); the humorous, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of stories told by Frank Stockton; and a bewildering miscellany of other works, of which the names Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Hamlin Garland, Alice French (Octave Thanet), Rowland Robinson, Frank Norris and Henry C. Bunner are as a brief but inviting index.

p. 517
The realistic movement in American fiction began, as we have noted, with the short-story writers; and presently the most talented of these writers, having learned the value of real scenes and characters, turned to the novel and produced works having the double interest of romance and realism; that is, they told an old romantic tale of love or heroism and set it amid scenes or characters that were typical of American life. Miss Jewett's novels of northern village life, for example, are even finer than her short stories in the same field. The same criticism applies to Miss Murfree with her novels of mountaineer life in Tennessee, to James Lane Allen with his novels of his native Kentucky, and to many another recent novelist who tells a brave tale of his own people. We call these, in the conventional way, novels of New England or the South or the West; in reality they are novels of humanity, of the old unchanging tragedies or comedies of human life, which seem more true or real to us because they appear in a familiar setting.

Note on p. 518
¹ Several of Howells's earlier novels deal with New England life, but superficially and without understanding. However minutely they depict its manners or mannerisms they seldom dip beneath the surface. If the reader wants not the body but the soul of New England, he must go to some other fiction writer, to Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, or to Rose Terry Cooke.

From Walter C. Bronson, A Short History of American Literature, New York: Heath, 1919, pp. 285, 297.

SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909) writes with gentle sympathy and delicate truthfulness of life along the Maine coast, interpreting the quiet nobility of simple men and women in whom still survive the best traditions of the earlier New England, with special fondness for taciturn old sailors; Deephaven (1877), A Country Doctor (1884), and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) show her at her best. (285)

Two writers already mentioned, MRS. FREEMAN and MISS JEWETT, attempted historical fiction with small success, the former in The Heart's Highway (1900), a story of Virginia in the seventeenth century, and the latter in The Tory Lover (1901). (297)

From Bliss Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction. Boston: Houghton, Miffilin, 1920 (revised 1930)

The use of landscape as an aid in powerful emotional effects begins again, however, with Dickens. It is noticeably rare in Thackeray, although here and there in single phrases and sentences he introduces the element of landscape with singularly delicate effect. But George Eliot, William Black, and Thomas Hardy have written whole chapters, one may almost say books, drenched with their feeling for the natural landscape against which their fictitious personages are relieved. In the stories of Ouida, and in some of the sketches of Lafcadio Hearn, the landscape sense runs riot. But if rightly subordinated to the human element, as is almost always the case in the novels of Turgenieff, or in the stories of Mr. Kipling or Miss Jewett, it becomes an element of extraordinary power and charm.

And yet if the question be put point-blank, "Do not such short story writers as Stevenson, Mr. Kipling, Miss Jewett, Bret Harte, Daudet -- not to mention Poe and Hawthorne -- stand for a new movement, a distinct type of literature?" one is bound to answer "Yes." Here is work that contrasts very strongly, not only with the Italian novella, and other medi?val types, but even with the English and American tales of two generations ago. Where lies the difference? For Professor Matthews is surely right in holding that there is a difference. It is safer to trace it, however, not in the external characteristics of this modern work, every feature of which can easily be paralleled in prehistoric myths, but rather in the attitude of the contemporary short story writer toward his material, and in his conscious effort to achieve under certain conditions a certain effect. And no one has defined this conscious attitude and aim so clearly as Edgar Allan Poe.

It is true, of course, that many stories, and these perhaps of the highest rank, avail themselves of all three of these modes of impression. Bret Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp," Mr. Cable's "Posson Jone," Mr. Aldrich's "Marjorie Daw," Mr. Kipling's "The Man who would be King," Miss Jewett's "The Queen's Twin," Miss Wilkins's "A New England Nun," Dr. Hale's "The Man without a Country," present people and events and circumstances, blended into an artistic whole, that defies analysis. But because we sometimes receive full measure, pressed down and running over, we should not forget that the cup of delight may be filled in a simpler and less wonderful way.

Then, too, the tendency to the production of sectional fiction, to which allusion has just been made, has prevented our fiction from taking on even the semblance of national quality. By dint of keeping their eyes on the object, many of our best writers have studied but the narrowest of fields. They do not represent, or pretend to represent, with adequacy the entirety even of that limited province for which they stand as representative authors. We speak, for instance, of Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mr. Page, Mr. Allen, Miss Johnston, Mr. Harris, Miss King, and a half dozen more, as representatives of the South in contemporary fiction; but they exhibit as many Souths as there are writers. Who can select any one book of these skilled story-tellers and say, "Here is the South represented through the art of fiction?" Or take New England, as interpreted by such excellent and such different writers as Mrs. Stowe, Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Mrs. Stowe shows one New England, Miss Wilkins another; each is marvelously true to the local color selected; but you cannot take "Old Town Folks" and "Deephaven" and "Pembroke" and "A Singular Life" and say "Here is New England." At best you can say "Here is a part of New England." Now if there is a difference in passing from the Vermont or Massachusetts of Miss Wilkins to the Maine of Miss Jewett, think of the difference in passing from these to the Virginia of Mr. Page, the Northwest of Mr. Garland, the California of Bret Harte, the Alaska of Mr. Jack London! If we can scarcely find a thoroughly representative sectional novel, how shall we expect a representative national novel.

From Blanche Colton Williams, Modern American Writers: Our Short Story Writers.

New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1922, pp. 1-21.

CHAPTER I

ALICE BROWN

MR. GRANT OVERTON in The Women Who Make Our Novels says discriminatingly about the lady whose name heads this chapter: "It is perhaps unfortunate that in a book dealing with American women novelists it should be necessary to confine the consideration of Alice Brown to her novels." Novelist, essayist, poet, dramatist, Alice Brown has done her best work in the short-story. On looking over certain of her earlier collections, however, one might well ask, ''Would the content of these tales not gain if organized into novel form?" Whether Miss Brown's first short-stories are to be regarded as tentative efforts toward noveldom or whether her novels must be viewed as the work of a short-story writer straying afield is a moot question. Not inconceivably she is one of those rare authors destined to compara- tive success in two literary types.

The New Hampshire scenes and persons in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales, obviously direct from her memory and observation, occur and recur throughout the volumes. One lays them down and with slight effort constructs a neighborhood history. If not quite novels in embryo or even in the amorphous state, they are at least prophecies. Beginning with High Noon, Miss Brown entered into constructive fiction. Her previous building rested on the knowledge and inheritance of childhood. The High Noon accomplishment is that of an artist finding herself, uncertainly, gropingly, in her chosen form. For this reason the stories are not real nor convincing as are those in the earlier volumes. They are trials toward a new goal. In The County Road, Vanishing Points, and The Flying Teuton the author has arrived. She is sure of her manner, her invention and her technic. She has mellowed to maturity. This is by no means to say that her first books may not be so valuable. From the point of view of literary history they are superior. No historian of New England writing henceforth may afford to neglect her studies — not more than he might omit those of Sarah Orne Jewett or the first work of Mary Wilkins Freeman. On the other hand, no account of the short-story would be complete without emphasis upon the greater art of her second and third periods.

Had Alice Brown so elected she might have ranked higher as essayist or poet than story writer. It is not too much to add that she may be remembered as dramatist. Something of her own feeling about the medium of expression she probably put into the letter Zoe Montrose wrote Francis Hume (in The Day of His Youth): "Do not write verse until you fail to express yourself in prose. Verse should glide full-winged over the surface of the waters where the spirit of God lies sleeping." Her versatility has meant breadth and variety; it has not favored, even if it has not hindered, her intensification in any one of the literary forms. If it has conduced to mixture rather than subtile differentiation of type, then the glory is greater to her short-stories that they have emerged triumphant.

Alice Brown was born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, December 5, 1857. "Her home was not so far from the sea," says Harriet Prescott Spofford, ''that the swift sea-turn did not creep in with its salt dews; and there the sound of the rote after great storms reached her ears and startled her imagination." She went to a district school, which she has undoubtedly commemorated in Number Five, the opening essay in Meadow Grass. "Up to the very hollow which made its playground and weedy garden the road was elm-bordered and lined with fair meadows, skirted in the background with shadowy pines, so soft they did not even wave; they only seemed to breathe." The treasures of the road she touches with lingering hand: the watering trough, the lichened fence, the pasture; the forget-me-not and the milkweed; the little river, the bridge and the meadows.

There her environment was not unlike that of her compeers over America; there history repeated itself. There was the boy who led his class (he does his hayin' now by hand); there was the youngster who ran away (he has become the shif'less citizen); there the inseparable friends fell in love with the same girl (only one remains); there was the little girl who lived with the selec'man's wife and who had only one beautiful thing to remember all her life — a pink cambric dress given her by the lady who "boarded'' a few weeks in the neighborhood.

It is deducible from her Tiverton stories that, apart from her school life, Miss Alice absorbed all the customs of the country and saw everything. She watched the making of rugs, hand-woven coverlets, occasionally the carding of wool into rolls and the spinning of rolls into thread; she knew how to make "riz doughnuts" and pies and biscuits; she knew what it was to visit in the "sullar" barrels of Bald'ins and barrels of pork. She knew how butter was kept cool (for she has recorded an instance of a napkin lost in the well); she knew how to chum and how to ''make the butter come.'' She observed the hogsheads under the eaves, where insects came daily to their death. She officiated at the winding of grandfather's clocks, took sharp note of false teeth, and knew that chewing cloves or wearing cracker poultices supposedly abated the pain of an aching molar. She was aware that a medicated stocking-leg is soothing to a sore throat. She was familiar with the cinnamon rose, the clove pink and the currant worm; she must have loved the larkspurs and ladies' delights, for she uses them over and again; she took note of hollows under syringa bushes where hens had bathed. She walked lanes bordered with raspberry and rose; roaming the fields and woods, she learned thoroughwort, spearmint, pennyr'yal, wormwood and tansy. She loved the forest under the sun and under the moon. Always she has loved trees; from her first stories to her latest, she is a Druid.

With adjoining communities she was on terms of acquaintance. Penrith figures occasionally; Horn o' the Moon frequently; Sudleigh often. Sudleigh, rival of Tiverton! The name is no mask for the initiated; it serves as well as the real for others. It is perhaps an example of unconscious humor or native shrewdness that New England thrift is illustrated in the Sudleighites (not by the Tivertonians) who sold ice water on a memorable occasion for a penny a glass.

Above all, Alice Brown knew people. Her picture of an old lady climbing upon an antiquated steed by means of chair and ''cricket" one would take oath is memory drawn; her village witch is reminiscent, albeit speaking, we doubt not, Miss Brown's own philosophy: "There's a good deal missed when ye stay at home makin' pies an' a good deal ye can learn if ye live out-door." Some years have passed since we saw her Children of Earth at Mr. Ames's Little Theatre; but we have not forgotten the village fool whose presence in the play testifies to his creator's kinship with Shakespeare. Miss Dyer and Mrs. Blair, of Joint Ownership (in Meadow Grass) are true neighborhood types. Then there are Parson True and his daughter, Farmer Eli Pike and his family, including Hattie's Sereno, and the Mardens, who, though types, are individualized, and we hazard, all of them, from originals. There is the old lady who, despoiled of youth's desire, approached octogenarianhood wearing a hat that proudly sported lavender roses; there is the vexatious Widow Poll, who tagged along where she was not wanted and who thrust her heavy foot by accident, premeditated or unpremeditated, into Heman's violin case (if she did not wear Congress gaiters, with elastic sides, some of her sisters did); there are the comforters of the sick who talk of death under circumstances similar to those attending the comfortee; there are those who immolate themselves on the shrine of ancestor worship and drag out barren lives — if service is ever barren.

Her nomenclature is redolent of New England: Caleb (Kelup), Eli, Cyrus, David, Elkanah, Solon, Liddy, Luceba, 'Mandy, Dorcas, Delilah.

And if her characters are not idealized portraits of childhood acquaintances they may well have been. If we go up Tiverton way we believe we shall find them all — older, perhaps, or even in the churchyard or recognizable in their descendants[.] " 'Ain't you Rufe Gill?' Fielding made the concession of his verb to place and time. The other straightened himself. 'Well, no,' he said, 'I ain't. But father is.' " (From A Runaway Match, in High Noon.)

In The End of All Living, her final sketch in Tiverton Tales, Miss Brown pictures the churchyard behind the First Church, on a sloping hillside, "Overrun with a briery tangle, and relieved by Nature's sweet and cunning hand from the severe decorum set ordinarily about the dead." For interest, the burial ground in Plymouth offers fit comparison with the spot described by Miss Brown, as Irving's Westminster Abbey is its companion-piece in literature.

About 1871 or '72, Miss Brown began her course at Robinson Seminary in Exeter. During the hardest winter months she lived in Exeter, but the rest of the year she walked to and from her home, nearly four miles.

It is less easy to determine from her work what she gathered in that period of advanced schooling. But she must have tucked away a good bit from the English poets, Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Rossetti and Tennyson; in those days she was training to teach. Her first essays are touched with unconscious rhythm of poetry. "— or when the board was set, what faces smiled," ends a sentence in Number Five, "a haunting spirit in perennial bliss" closes The End of All Living. Perfect iambic pentameters, each. It was from her poetic power, Harriet Prescott Spofford said some years ago, her friends expected the most.

Miss Brown taught for a few years in the country and Boston, but "hating it more and more every minute," as she herself has said, she gave up teaching for writing. After working for a time on the Christian Register, she became, in 1885, a member of the staff of The Youth's Companion. There she ground out stuff from the latest books and magazines and wrote stories. Eventually she resigned to devote herself entirely to writing.

In 1886 she first went abroad, spending the greater part of the year in France; in 1890 she went again, "enjoying five months of gentle vagabondage in England." Part of the time she spent in London, but more of it in Devon and Cornwall, regions for which she was made eager through the history of her native village. It will be recalled by those who have read The Flat-Iron Lot (Tiverton Tales), "the first settlers came from Devon.'' Six years later, By Oak and Thorn, a collection of travel reminiscences, incorporated Miss Brown's reaction to her pleasant holiday.

In 1895 she made another journey, in the companionship of Louise Imogen Guiney, walking all of ten weeks in Wales, Shropshire and Devon, and going up to London for a season with the younger English poets. In collaboration with Miss Guiney, she published a booklet on Robert Louis Stevenson, a study which is also an appreciation.

In 1895 Meadow Grass appeared.* Reviews of the book favored Farmer Eli's Vacation. C. M. Thompson, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, July, 1906, states that he regards it as Miss Brown's best achievement. But in story value and structure it is inferior to Told in the Poorhouse, A Righteous Bargain, or Joint Owners in Spain, not to go outside of the same covers. As has been indicated in reconstructing the early days of Miss Brown's life, these are tales, presumably, of the Hampton Falls neighborhood. The homely dialect of this and her succeeding collection, Tiverton Tales (1899) contributes to verisimilitude and drama as it inspires the reader with sympathy for the dramatis person?. In English fiction one must go to George Eliot for fit comparison; Mary Ann Evans, one of, and yet apart from, Warwickshire folk, saw their oddities and foibles. Miss Brown stands in the same relation to her Tivertonians. She is one of them at heart, and yet she is not quite democratic. Not that she feels aloofness or means to convey superiority. She suffers from or profits by a point of view, native to her and strengthened by absence, which recognizes them as ''characters.'' In so recognizing them she unconsciously aligns herself with the external standards of conventionality and culture. Now and

then she drops into an "I" use which brings her singularly back into the magic circle of her own. Mr. C. M. Thompson liked her dialect stories because he knew her class of people; a writer in Reedy's Mirror later remarked that if one cannot sympathize with her people it is because he is so saturated with the New England atmosphere. The combined comment offers two somewhat contradictory angles from which results agreement that she is successful.

The technique of these stories reveals the tryer-out. After All, for example, maintains unity by a nice emphasis upon character; it works out its theme. But the ''story" falters. So the dramatic note occurs, but by fits and starts, showing that the author has the sense of drama but has not learned properly to subdue the unimportant, to graduate to scale and to point up her climaxes. She sees the universally dramatic and pathetic in human relations, however small the revealing occurrence. Told in the Poorhouse will illustrate as well as any of the tales her early inclination to the dramatic:

Josh Marden and his wife Lyddy Ann have been married for ''fifteen year" when Josh's second cousin 'Mandy comes to help with the work. She starts trouble. Josh "looked at 'Mandy an' he got over seein' Lyddy Ann, that's all." On Josh's birthday 'Mandy gave him a present of a bill folder. He discarded the old one. Lyddy took it back for her own. "An' arterwards it come out that the old pocket-book was one she'd bought for him afore they was married — earned in bindin' shoes." Later, when 'Mandy presumed to sit in Lyddy's place at table, the wife ordered her up. "You've took my husband away, but you shan't take my place at table." Josh orders Lyddy into the foreroom. 'Mandy leaves. For some years Lyddy keeps to her side of the house, Josh to his. At last he falls sick, suffers a stroke, and Lyddy tends him. Before he dies he makes trial of speech. Lyddy thinks she understands, " 'Yes, Joshuay, yes, dear!' An' she got up an' took the pocket-book 'Mandy had gi'n him off the top o' the bureau an' laid it down on the bed where he could git it. But he shook his head, an' said the word ag'in, an' a queer look — as if she was scairt an' pleased — flashed over Lyddy Ann's face. She ran into the parlor, an' come back with that old pocket-book he'd give up to her, an' she put it into his well hand. That was what he wanted. His fingers gripped it up, an' he shet his eyes. He never spoke ag'in."

The stories in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales reveal, in the complimentary sense, their feminine authorship. Miss Brown sees events through the woman's eyes, which means that she sees them more truly than if she attempted the masculine point of view. For the sexes rarely envision correctly other than through their respective lenses. And although Miss Brown's later stories succeed in assuming the masculine angle, she grew in years and in practice before attempting it. Whether, therefore, playing up a woman heroine or villain Miss Brown's earlier stories emphasize the woman's outlook. Her men are convincing, but slightly drawn; they appear infrequently, as men on a New England farm are infrequently at the house. Her children are shadowy. Either they are cowed and humble, like Rosie of the March Wind, or they are well-behaved and inconspicuously demure, like Claribel of After All. Yet, later on, Miss Brown was to show her sympathy with girlhood in The Secret of the Clan (1912).

If Miss Brown's mental attitude challenges comparisons with that of George Eliot, her characters bring back memories of Cranford. Deacon Pitts, mentioned in Dooryards, prefatory sketch in Tiverton Tales, had a ghoulish delight in funerals. This morning the butcher had brought him news of death in a neighboring town. Suddenly, as he turned back toward the house, bearing a pan of liver, his pondering eye caught sight of his aged wife toiling across the fields. ''He set down his pan and made a trumpet of his hands. 'Sarah!' he called piercingly. 'Sarah! Mr. Amasa Blake's passed away! Died yesterday!' '' Who can forget the Cranford lady, threatened to surrender by a fit of coughing, her delicious morsel of gossip! And if the gentleman evokes the thought, "At least Tiverton is not composed altogether of Amazons!'' still he betrays his kinship with the females of Mrs. Gaskell's species.

Tiverton Tales can hardly be described as elaborating the sentiment of love; yet the greater number of them embody the passion as it slighted or glanced at or enveloped her people. The Mortuary Chest, most delightful of the series, introduces the elderly maiden and her old lover — the clergyman who had married elsewhere and who now recalls the past with his first love; Horn o' the Moon presents Doctor Mary, self-appointed to nurse Johnnie Veasey, and left forlorn when Johnnie goes away to marry the other girl; A Stolen Festival, which tells something about the first wedding anniversary of Letty and David, betrays his forgetfulness of the day, Letty's pitiful attempt to celebrate, and her early schooling to the difference between the ways of men and women; A Last Assembling, comparable only to Miss Wilkins's A New England Nun, with a glint of Cornelia Comer's Long Inheritance threading through it, psychologizes the refusal of Dilly to marry Jethro after many years; A Second Marriage unmistakably reveals the hidden springs of Amelia's decision not to marry the love of her boyhood, Laurie Morse.

But the most individual story in the volume is The Way of Peace, which recounts the sorrow of a daughter for her mother and her successful attempt to impersonate that mother. When she saw herself in the mirror she was comforted. And her way of peace was assured when the youngest of her nephews and nieces crept up to her and asked, "Grandma, when'd you get well?" Pathological and nostalgic, perhaps, but saved by its uncompromising honesty.

In making a study of Alice Brown's development, her novels and other works should be taken into account. It is to be regretted that the present comment must omit them, with only suggestions here and there, which may be traced out to the fuller completion of the tapestry.

Her early story-writing was diversified, then, by a historical study, Mercy Otis Warren, in connection with which she did much research work acquainting herself fully with the revolutionary era. A volume of poems, The Road to Castaly, also marks her productivity before 1900. King's End and Margaret Warrener were published in 1901.

The volume of stories succeeding Tiverton Tales marks a distinct change in her subject-matter and her method, or more accurately a reversion to the novelette experiment, The Day of His Youth. In High Noon (1904) sentiment is pronounced and increased, love dominates, and the business of marriage provokes the author's analytical powers. Admirers confessed of Miss Brown's work, we think it not too harsh to say that such stories as The Book of Love are Myrtle Reedian, at best — in the language of the hero, Graham — "a kind of divine nonsense." A Meeting in the Market Place, His Enemy, Natalie Blayne, A Runaway Match, Rosamund in Heaven, The Miracle, The Map of the Country, and The End of the Game all are permeated by a scientific sentimental interest in love. The disappointed, the hope of union after death, the adjustment of temperaments, the salvation through service of those love has passed by — these and similar themes constitute the illuminatingly subjective side of the volume.

Prominent among her characters, now, are literary men and women. Her own attitude is more consciously literary. The title, High Noon, she follows out by a proverb from the Persian, "One instant only is the sun at noon," and indicates thereby her recognition of the crucial moment. She is studying the nature of the short-story and short-story writers. In The End of the Game she speaks of the short-story as "perfect of form and sonnet-like in finish," mentions Prosper Merimee — the earliest of conte writers — and concludes The End of the Game in a Lady-or-Tiger manner, which certainly points to study of Stockton. Her local color, save for the marsh, is disappearing. The best of the lot is Natalie Blayne, in that it is more objective and is possessed of sufficient humor to redeem the sentiment elsewhere overstrained.

In The County Road (1906) the author returns to her country folk but creates with a noticeably freer hand than in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales. In ten years her Tiverton friends have advanced, with the rest of the world. Blue coverlets still exist, but the book telling how to make them Cynthia of Bachelor's Fancy finds in the attic. Nancy of the masculine pipe and tobacco still wanders, Sudleigh stage runs, and shoe-binding continues. But she looks forward, not backward. Her young people meet on nearly equal terms with the old folk. It is true that Abigail and Jonathan in A Day Off are the protagonists and their daughter plays a secondary rôle, but the daughter provides causation for the mother's acts throughout It is also true that Old Immortality, the most distinctive story in the volume, has an old couple for its chief actors. But A Winter's Courting, The Looking Glass, The Twisted Tree, and Bachelor's Fancy have for heroines young and beautiful women. If her study of love is still pathological, it is also more sane and hopeful. By logical growth and development Miss Brown uses old scenes in a novel way. Her temperament has become pronounced and her art has advanced at the expense of locale. The creator has displaced the copyist. Oddly enough, the sea has gained hold upon Miss Brown. Cynthia of Elephant's Mountain, worn threadbare, obsessed by her husband's much greasing of his boots, leaves the country and takes refuge with her sister by the sea. The scene is Fastnet, and the Captain of the tale is one after Miss Jewett's order.

Her dramatic power has grown. A Day Off, for example, is constructed in scenes, the action of which is developed through dialogue. Her characters stand on their own feet, here as in the other stories.

She elaborates her theories of soul-communion. The Cave of Adullam emphasizes the joy of living in spirit beside the heart's love; Bankrupt (of Meadow Grass) is its prototype. Miss Lucretia of one is Dorcas of the other in a similar situation.

A new note of allegory enters The County Road, extended in her subsequent stories. Sylvia of The Twisted Tree in her sick-soul condition is obsessed with the idea that the tree symbolizes herself. (O. Henry touched the theme in The Last Leaf). Haven, who loves Sylvia, grafts new shoots upon the tree; Sylvia recovers. It is worth while following out Miss Brown's interest in this motif as expressed in A Home-spun Wizardry (Harper's, October, 1913) and A Mind Cure (Harper's, August, 1914).

We have emphasized the beginning of Miss Brown's work, for in it lies the germ of all her subsequent development. We may pass over Country Neighbors (1910), The One-Footed Fairy and Other Stories (1911) and study her perfect orientation in Vanishing Points (1913). This collection was also preceded by her novels, Rose McLeod and Paradise.

Her setting may be, now, Boston or Darjheeling; her characters may be young, middle-aged or old; they may be curates, editors or autocrats of civic affairs; they may be Aunt Harriets of Overland, or Elisha Porsons of commercial circles. She may set her stage for men, alone, as she does in The Master — one of the best "man" stories ever written by a woman; for the actors in young love, as in The Discovery or The Flight of the Mouse; for millionaires and journalists, as in The Lantern. She may write in the person of a man-narrator or as the camera-author. It matters not. Her people act and interact so as to give the illusion of life.

She breasts out against new subjects, swimming with the times. She makes, for instance, a case of social theories and practices in The Man in the Cloister and concludes that human kindness is the solution of the problem presented. She has advanced in the plot or "fable." She has a story to tell, not merely a thesis to illustrate, a "character" to hit off. She is adept at creating suspense, pause, climax; she weaves the fabric of her plot by clues and forecast and their fulfillment. Whole scenes may be lifted and acted on the stage with but slight changes for "directions." In The Master, for example, the table scene; in The Lantern, the scene between Porson and the Marshalls. She is not always skillful with coincidence; the double one in The Clue will strain the reader's credulity. So the poor architecture of The House With the Tower (Harper's, May, 1914), is righted by a storm that rises all too easily. But she apologizes for coincidence in a later volume: "It is true that the most extraordinary and exact coincidences happen, as if pieces in the mosaic of life, made to fit together in some mysterious forecast of destiny, rush toward each other and are finally joined."+ Perhaps she is colder and remoter in some of her later tales. If so, the reason lies largely in the truth that she leaves her characters to declare themselves: the story is more objective than her earlier and comparatively subjective interpretations.

March 21, 1913, Winthrop Ames, of The Little Theatre, New York, inaugurated a drama contest. One thousand six hundred and forty-six plays were submitted. In 1914, the award of ten thousand dollars was made to Alice Brown for Children of Earth. It is not a good acting play, as the published version may show to those who did not see it while on the boards. But the fidelity to New England life is not less than that evinced in Meadow Grass and Tiverton Tales; it is imaginative and poetic. It illustrates in its non-success the paradox that some of the most dramatic story-writers fall short on the actual stage.

The Flying Teuton (1918), following Bromley Neighborhood and The Prisoner, carries on the method of Vanishing Points, with an emphasis upon the supernatural. She had already touched it in The Tryst and There and Here of High Noon. Her Tryst of the Flying Teuton is the companion piece of the former Tryst in that the earlier story looks mystically into the future and the life beyond, while the later illustrates the theory of transmigration of souls and hints at remote pasts of two who meet in Paestum. The Flying Teuton, the story lending its name to the book, is a sort of modem Flying-Dutchman that has been classed among the great short-stories produced by the World War. A Citizen and His Wife is not far behind it — a spy story combined with a unique love motive: a traitor is betrayed by his wife who loved him only a little less than her country. The Island emphasizes Miss Brown's favorite thesis, that life and love are continuous in a vast and beautiful way, touched long before in A Meeting in the Market-Place (High Noon). It conceives the ideal as one where Keats's magic casements are part of the mansion of the soul, where Shelley's Skylark is real and where invisible colonies reach out to aid England. It is but a step from this story content to The Wind Between the Worlds (1920) and its theme of whether or not communication with the dead is possible. It also finds reverberation in Old Lemuel's Journey (Atlantic Monthly, June, 1920), which takes the dying man upon a mysterious visit before his final demise.

A quarter century has elapsed between Miss Brown's first stories and her latest. She has become a citizen of the world; her story people have become citizens of the world. And yet as a world-weary traveler returns with joy to his native heath, she occasionally writes of her home folk. Her flavor is less strong as the cosmopolite is less remarked than the villager. There are readers who prefer the meadow and Tiverton, those who prefer the denizens of the world — burning laurel leaves idly for ceremonial, pasting book-plates in volumes newly arrived from England, telling stories in French and referring easily to ''roses from Paestan rosaries.'' It is perhaps a trifle to be lamented that some of us like the author so well in all her phases we cannot tell which Alice Brown we fain would see immortal. But we are content to leave all her works on the knees of the gods.

Williams's Notes

*Preceded by her early novel, Fools of Nature.

+The Flying Teuton, page 48.

Volumes of stories by Miss Brown:

Meadow Grass, 1895.

Tiverton Tales, 1899.

High Noon, 1904.

The County Road, 1906.

Country Neighbors, 1910.

The One-Footed Fairy, 1911.

Vanishing Points, 1913.

The Flying Teuton, 1918.

Homespun and Gold, 1920.